


Summer's On Its Deathbed

by adiostoreadoormat (choicescarfsylveon)



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Body Horror, Death City Politics, F/F, F/M, Female Crona (Soul Eater), Manga, Post-Canon, Unfinished Resbang, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-05-16 10:59:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14810067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choicescarfsylveon/pseuds/adiostoreadoormat
Summary: Five years after the events of the manga, Crona returns from the moon.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! The following is/was my attempt at the Soul Eater Resonance Bang of 2017. Unfortunately I wasn't able to post it in time for the contest, but I'm working on it again this year and still want to share. The theme of the Resbang was "Lost and Found."
> 
> Reading Summer's On Its Deathbed requires having read the entire Soul Eater manga, as, if you know if you've read it, Crona's manga storyline diverges pretty significantly from the anime's. This goes out to my fellow CroMa shippers who loved and fucking lived for the final chapters of the manga as much as I did. <3 I know a lot of us feel like Crona's fate was left up in the air (literally LOL) so yeah, this is my attempt at rendering that.
> 
> Thanks so much to the super talented[ alliope](https://alliope.tumblr.com/post/168837773036/oh-man-here-it-is-this-is-my-art-for-resbang) and [drywavelength](http://drywavelength.tumblr.com/post/168839718301/heres-my-art-for-summers-on-its-deathbed) who still made artwork and a playlist for this thing even though I couldn't finish. Please check it out through those links and give them props.
> 
> *Each chapter has a corresponding song, which I link to at the beginning. Title comes from [Panic! At The Disco's The Calendar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb5kV59Kg_M)*

**CHAPTER ONE**

 

 

([Mr. Moon by Eisley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpbIPyeG-r0))

 

 

Maka finds Crona, standing alone before the facade of stain glass windows, in the gothic Italian church where they met for the first time, years ago. She looks hauntingly beautiful in her black dress. Different than the one before it, collared and cropped above the ankles, the gown she wears now is a full-body garment: swathing her neck, clinging to her hips, sweeping across the floor, its train made of intricate lace, black roses. The train looks to be moving on its own accord, alive, like its been weaved with black blood as thread.

 

Maka can’t believe it’s really her. Crona looks out the window, unaware that someone has entered, so Maka walks slowly. Her breath catches in her throat when she hears the doors heave shut behind her, on their own accord. So long ago, she’d been trapped here facing certain death, Soul’s blood pooling in her lap. _“These doors only open way._ _T_ _hey open inwards.”_ The disconcerting fear she’d felt that night, death thick in the atmosphere, pulses through Maka as she walks down the aisle now.

 

Once she reaches the steps of the altar, Crona looks over her shoulder at her. Maka freezes, but Crona’s expression is soft, unoffensive. The course of fear instantly melts from Maka’s body, replaced itself instead with courage, and love. She has come here on purpose this time; to re-discover her old friend, show her how she feels. She’s welcome here.

 

Crona turns back to face the window when Maka comes close enough to see details: the dress, upon closer inspection, is moving, almost vibrating softly. Has a thick, heavy-looking zipper that stretches from Crona’s hairline to her lower back. The slider, at the top, has lock on it.

 

“Do you have the key?”

 

Crona asks like Maka should know. Maka suddenly feels a light weight on her chest. Looks down and sees that she’s wearing a necklace. She takes the silver key at the end of it into her hand, fits it into the lock, begins her travels south. It feels the way madness once used to, compulsive, but Maka knows that this isn’t madness. Her head is dead clear.

 

Crona had asked for this. Maybe, this would cure her.

 

But Soul and the others, what would they think of her?

 

Underneath the silken garment, Crona’s pale skin shines, over bruised shoulders and knobby spine. She slips her arms out of the dress as it drops from her torso, pooling around her hips.

 

“I knew that you would come for me,” Crona says.

 

Maka tries to act like they’re having a normal conversation. “Of course. You’re my friend, Crona. This is what friends do.”

 

At those words, Crona glances at Maka over her shoulder, almost suspicious, just a touch. Maka is ever on guard for the slip of Crona’s eyes from navy blue to silver ice, the way they had that night when Crona cut Soul open.

 

But they aren’t changing now; still clouded and somber. Pretty. Maka swallows. Suddenly knows that part of the game is that she’s to disrobe, too. Crona’s eyes follow her every minute movement, as she undoes her green tie, leaving it loose around her neck, takes off each glove and tosses it to the floors. Maka’s surprised at the steadiness with which she picks each button open on her shirt.

 

Before she knicks the last button, Crona turns to her face. Maka feels momentarily that she can’t breathe. Crona’s nipples are flushed deep with her blood, dark violet, almost black. It’s eerie, ethereal. Makes Maka’s stomach twist with delight.

 

Crona’s chest blushes blueish-black, in anticipation.

 

“What?” Crona crosses her arms over chest.

 

“I’m sorry.” _Eye contact,_ _asshole,_ Maka self-scolds. _Focus_. _You’re not Soul._ “I’ve just never seen you naked before.”

 

Crona tilts her head, her hair ghosting her shoulders.

 

“You aren’t naked,” she notes.

 

Maka unclasps her bra from the back, lets it fall to the ground.

 

She stands only in her plaid skirt, socks and shoes. Crona’s dress moves suddenly beneath them. The train of her skirt slinks slowly along the tile, like liquid. Wraps itself up one of Maka’s legs. Strokes the base of her underwear.

 

Suddenly, it hits her: when she found Crona on this night, the real one, it was because Lord Death had just sent for her execution.

 

This was not what had happened, not at all.

 

In the real moment, Crona fled. Her dress, that wicked weaponry, lashed out at Maka, thorned black blood vines that threatened to kill. Crona's eyes twisted and turned. She spoke of destroying humanity. The world. Herself.

 

Maka awakes with a start in her own bedroom. Five years since that night. The black moon hangs, haunting and cryptic through her window, which she mistakenly left open tonight.

 

What a strange dream, indeed. It wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last.

 

 

 

 

Five years after the almost-end of the world, Maka Albarn really has nothing to complain about. Currently, she stands as the youngest tenured professor in the history of the DWMA, with the research creds and masters degree to prove it.

 

As an employee of the Academy, her duties vary greatly from the ones she had when she was a student in EAT. The life she lives now, happy, but busy, has her teaching sixteen courses a week in medicine, fitness, law enforcement, and even music. This is all on top of her personal mentorship program for female students who were struggling, her weekly faculty-staff meetings, and the ever constant presence of Dr. Stein, picking her brain and peer-reviewing her research.

 

Though it helps that material taught to students these days is less about physical strength, having to battle. Lord Death’s new educational initiatives for this era, which Maka and most professors are more than happy to enforce, is focused rather on enriching the kids’ spiritual intelligence.

 

Since now, there are no witches or a kishin to extinguish. No Madness to end.

 

There is still the governmental security duty that Maka, as a member of the longstanding SPARTOI, has to carry out as one official hand of Lord Death’s. He still insists on his close friends calling him Kid. In addition to having each of them serve in his Central Intelligence Agency, he often dispatches them on investigations throughout the globe, to ensure that his World Peace Order is being upheld.

 

At the end of her long days, as always, she comes home to Soul. This time in a stunning three story townhouse at the top of the upscale First district. Though both frequently complain that the place is way too big for them, having rooms with doors they haven’t even opened, Kid refuses to let them take back their post-war real estate gift from him personally.

 

The house’s décor is red and black, vampiric fashion, courtesy of Soul. These days, it’s been empty as Soul has been in Africa for the last nine months. Maka would say things with her ex weapon partner are par the course, but she knows that there was something distinctly not right with them before his departure.

 

Something that their distance, she fears, has probably worsened.

 

His impending return is tonight; a Thursday, August night. It’s distracting her at school, throwing her off her game. Her freshman students in her History of Demonology class are especially wired. She can’t keep them from bouncing off the walls, chattering, not listening. She remembers being their age, when she seemed to be the only one concerned with lectures that weren’t about battle; Soul and Black☆Star threw pens at each other, roughhousing over benches, when they weren’t.

 

There was an urgency in the EAT class when a kishin egg or murderer could be just around the corner. In Kid’s era of peace, there is no such impending danger; only the light, petty crimes that come with any big city lifestyle. There isn’t even a division between EAT and NOT anymore. This is a good thing; she’s glad children are safe. But they’re unmotivated to learn because of the lack of stakes.

 

Or maybe, being a retired war hero, she’s biased in that thought. Bored, perhaps.

 

She tries not to be impatient with them, but on days like today, it’s hard not to Maka Chop them with a copy of the textbook. It doesn’t help that, all day, her mind’s been on that dream. Stuck in the past, finding Crona in that chapel again and again. Her once beautiful friend, lost, had seemed to her so real.

 

It only happened when she let the moon shine through her window.

 

After her class, Maka considers today a failed attempt at instilling inspiration; working to get that Teacher of the Year award is proving harder than she thought. Post wiping the giant blackboard, her calculations, she pounds the erasers in her hands, easing out her frustration. The itchy clouds they form irritate her throat, powder her clothes in black soot. She doesn’t care. The pain in her lungs is a welcome distraction. It feels good to feel some physical aggression.

 

“Good lecture today, Albarn. Though you might try subjecting your students to a little more healthy fear. That way, they won’t be all over the place.”

 

Dr. Stein walks through the doors of her hall, disorganized clipboard in his hands. He’s quite the picture of organization otherwise, despite his harrowing past, his jagged stitched apparel traded in for sleek, professional dress clothes. This week, he’s doing what she hopes is the last of his semesterly teacher evaluations.

 

“Oh, was that your teaching strategy?” Maka asks, still pounding erasers. The freakishly tall specimen of a man, draws closer to her. “I didn’t realize making us kill all those endangered birds was ‘healthy.’”

 

“Your father called. This morning.” Stein wipes the a soot cloud from his field of vision, as if that even bothers him a little. Chain smoker. “He sends his love from the mission to find Doubt in Romania. He also asked me to see if there was someone, in his words, ‘special in your picture.’ Just like he asked me yesterday.”

 

“Do either of you really think I have time for a relationship with a full time class load and a job in the CIA?”

 

“He’s the one who’s asking, not me. Personally, I think a woman your age, in your position, with your prestige, should only be interested in men if they’re already dead. You know, for dissection purposes. For science.”

 

“You’re the worst substitute Dad in the world.”

 

Maka sighs when the erasers in her hands start to lose their cloud. The doctor might have a point, she considers, about the fear.

 

“Some days are really great with them,” she says, putting the erasers down. “Some days, I know I'm making a difference, that they’re excited about the material. But lately I feel like I’ve been boring them to death. Like I’m out of touch or an old lady or something. The problem is I’m teaching them a lot of the same curriculum I learned, but they don’t have the same use for it that I did.”

 

“Well, our students are coming from poorer and poorer districts these days,” says Stein. “Not that kids who weren’t raised in the districts at the top of the town can’t be brilliant, in their own right. It’s just that they don’t really trust us.”

 

Maka loves the Academy. Its practically her home, she was raised in it. But she feels sequestered from the rest of world, working here. She’s realized in the last couple of years that she's considered wealthy, always been being born of two DWMA elites. It wasn’t until the war ended, and she got exposed to so many different kinds of people and families, having to meet her students’ parents at conferences, that she realized that how many people outside Academy have absolutely no idea of its inner workings. Some of them, she found, deeply questioned the DWMA’s decisions, from the pardoning of the witches to its ever having violent practices at all.

 

She senses now that, even before the war—perhaps her whole life—there was a current of distrust from the majority about the people and the place, the government and the establishment, that she respects the most. 

 

More and more each year, she realizes there is a global poor, whose lives are affected by her status in ways she can’t understand. As a child, she’d been unaware of her privileges. Now, in her twenties, she struggles with them.

 

Stein is writing something on his clipboard, now, but he says, to interrupt her thoughts,

 

“Something’s off with you, Maka.”

 

She wipes dust from her clothes. It's ironic that her father has  _this guy_ stationed in a role meant to be emotional and caring for her.

 

“I’m fine,” Maka says.

 

But she’s thinking about last night again.

 

These dreams about Crona, vivid, involved, and visceral, have been coming on in droves for the last year. They are always about the Crona from the after, after Medusa had re-captured her and wiped her memory. They were all these gothic, romance novel-esque, slow-motion pans of dark, brooding details about Crona’s physical appearance. Things Maka was sure her mind just wanted to know to assuage her survivor's guilt.

 

The first dream occurred on the day she realized, concretely, that things in her life were so good, almost too good, that she sort of _wanted_ something bad to happen these days. To jolt her senses. Maka used to define herself as a brawler, one of the damn best meisters at the Academy for her age. Some days she still feels like a soldier with PTSD, that she should still be arming Soul, still on edge. Its residual with all her friends; Black☆Star, Tsubaki, and Liz talk about feeling that way, too. It isn’t that she wants some tragedy, it’s that she wants something to challenge her again, something grand to work towards. Something to make her feel like she hasn’t been in a hazy good dream, asleep for the last five years.

 

Often, the only time she ever feels really awake anymore is when she’s meeting Crona in these tortured rendezvous.

 

“The only person with better soul perception than you is me,” Stein asserts. His soul wavelength reaches out to hers, vibing it. “You’re not fine.”

 

Maka sighs. Attempting to repel his perception is futile.

 

“It’s been a long day,” she says, regardless. “That’s all.”

 

"Suit yourself."

 

 

 

 

 

The first time Maka dreamed of Crona, it was surrounding the circumstances that also caused Maka and Soul to break up, nine months ago. Maka and Soul were flying in one her father’s private jets (oh, Kid and his gratuitous, ego-boosting postwar gifts) to a village near the outskirts of Rome. Maka was researching fantasy literature history for a course, so Soul was under the impression that this trip was purely educational.

 

On the plane, Maka was reading a thick textbook, but stopped when Soul started throwing bits of sticky rice at her hair. She tried not to smile at his frisky imposition, knowing she should at least _try_ to act frustrated.

 

“I’m busy." She swatted grains with her gloved hand.

 

“If you keep reading that book, your eyes are gonna roll out onto the floor. You’re gorgeous and all, but I can’t get down with an eyeless chick.”

 

Maka closed the book and held it up in attack mode, like she’d chop him. She couldn’t hurt him when he looked so fucking good, though, the way he did that day. He was wearing all white, as he often had since the end of things, the blanch of the apparel a stark contrast to his golden skin. It didn’t also did not help that she still felt jolts of excitement, waves of intense lust, and trust, hearing her partner call her things like ‘gorgeous’ to her face, to this day.

 

It was just days after Kid’s coronation ceremony, days after he told her that all his music was something they’d made together, that finally, the long missing romantic aspect of their relationship seemed to suddenly just fit. The battle on the moon, in which they’d both risked their lives more than ever, made their resonance the strongest it had ever been, so strong that she didn't even need for him to be her weapon, to feel it.

 

“I’m trying to find this reference to a text from 1200 about a priest who swears he saw a man with swords for arms,” Maka says, reopening the book, re-ignoring him. “I can’t find it anywhere. Maybe if it wasn’t three thousand pages, and all these pages weren’t so ripped.”

 

Soul shook his head, grinned. “This for a lesson or something?”

 

“Not really, I am teaching my B-Class about the origins of magic next year, but this won’t be part of their material. I want to know, for me. And for your surprise.”

 

Soul sort of pat his lap, then, and whether it was an invitation or not, Maka sat there; wrapped her bony knees around his tight waist. When she was this close to his face, she could see the pointy ends of his shark teeth just barely poking into his lower lip. He never could close his mouth quite all the way, something she’d always found hot about him.

 

“Why Italy, huh?” he said then. “You still haven’t told me what it is we’re doing here.”

 

“You have to trust me,” she said. “I found something the other day that I think you’ll think is really awesome.”

 

Months before, she’d pored over the text she was extrapolating now for the first time. It was one of the oldest ancient texts on tales of demons and magic in existence, part of the lot she had tucked away in her copious new mansion library. As a new years resolution to her boyfriend that year, she had promised Soul that she would track his family ancestry down as far back as she could, specifically to find out why he was the only one of his known relatives in the last two or three hundred years to be a demon weapon.

 

 _This is so romantic,_ she’d thought as she started her work, _three to four generations of recessive genes and_ he’s _the chosen one. He’ll love this, he will._ From Evans to Churches to Henderson she searched, and the last known surname she could find was Valkyrie. One Emeline Valkyrie.

 

She was so excited after finding a hit in Emeline that she decided to soul perceive. One of her favorite capabilities was that in which she resonanced out to other countries; sometimes she did it when she was bored, listening to and feeling out humanity all over the world, eating, laughing and loving in peace. It soothed her, made her feel less like she was growing old and reclusive in her high office tower.

 

Closing her eyes, she imagined the web of souls, blue dots with white links spreading out over Europe, and felt a zone over Italy that gave her an odd sensation in her chest. She zoned in on it, rifling through individual souls until she felt the odd one again. It vibrated against hers, and in the magical web in her mind, she could see that it was purple like a witch’s soul. It was normal to sense witches in the midst of a human crowd, but closer focus on this area made her realize that this was a crowd of ghosts’ souls.

 

She got out an old detailed atlas of Europe and confirmed that the area she was sensing was in fact a cemetery in Italy. She then went through records of that cemetery to find the details of the plot her senses fixed her on, and found that it was none other than the burial ground of Emeline Valkyrie.

 

Maybe the ghostly-zombie-witch soul under this headstone was trying to reach out to her because she’d resonated with Soul before.

 

“Whatever it is,” Soul continued on the plane, “it better be worth it.” He smiled and kissed her. “Eh, usually is.”

 

Their kiss led to them having sex on the plane; it used to make Maka nervous doing it back there, but the pilot had a soundproof chamber, and over the years, it had become exhilarating.

 

Soul would make fun of her, call her an exhibitionist. She would insist it was nothing so scandalous. Then hit him over the head.

 

The airport where they usually landed was shut down, the pilot let them know through the speaker system an hour later. Maka was reading again, Soul’s legs propped in her lap as he played a handheld game. She looked out of the window then and suddenly felt on edge, surveying the village, the disarray she saw in the streets. This was somewhere Maka had never been before, but she was familiar with the rundown city from maps she’d seen in books. Though it looked in fine on the page, and in her mind, It wasn’t peaceful here, she could tell. This dark pocket of Italy held a darkness that she couldn’t sense from her bedroom.

 

Maybe this was that other energy Kid had told them about recently. It wasn’t quite Madness; it was colder, quieter, but it was certainly was similar to the former's stiff grip on one's sanity. It made her feel again as though something monstrous might spring out of nowhere. Her heart raced as they unboarded their plane.

 

As she and Soul walked through the streets, people eyed them suspiciously, hiding their children. Soul does have a DWMA patch on his sleeve. She realizes that the people must think that they’re police. They kind of are. A courier, on carriage drawn bicycle, silently takes them to the embassy of Kid’s they’re going to be staying in overnight. Then, they get ready and Soul transforms into a scythe for her, so they can fly using her angel wings for the short distance to the graveyard.

 

When they get to the ground, Maka focuses her resonance again on the purple soul. It’s a witches’ soul no doubt, and sensing it so intensely puts a healthy dose of fear in her; a reverent one, a respect of witches’ awesome power. She's able to locate the tombstone precisely with her powers.

 

"This is probably the creepiest date we've ever been on."

 

"Shh. I'm trying to focus."

 

Suddenly, a mangled hand reaches out from under the ground, grabs Maka’s ankle, twisting it tight. Right in the moment that Soul produces a slick black blade instead of his arm, slices the zombie hand clean off, blood and guts splurting everywhere.

 

It's a welcome shock; Maka hasn’t felt revved up from being attacked by an enemy in a long time. Soul was breathing hard too, his scythe arm dripping with burgundy blood. He transforms it back to a human arm, the witch blood staining his white jacket, and hoists Maka up from the ground.

 

“Thanks." Her ankle twinges with sharp pain; she winches, stares down at it. There are four claw mark tears in her sock, and her skin has been cut.

 

“So, this lady’s my family, huh?” Soul says. “Guess she doesn’t approve of my girlfriend. Sorry, Maka. I guess it’s over.”

 

Maka elbows him in the ribs and reaches down to touch the pulse of the cuts on her foot. The blood that stains her glove is her mostly own, but there’s something off about it; the zombie witch’s darker blood from the severed mixing in with her own a bit.

 

That night, and on the plane the next morning, she felt sick in a way she couldn’t place. That night, she stayed awake until dawn, poring over books about witches and genetics, about blood and souls. She remembers what she has always known comprehensibly about Madness, and how it affects those afflicted with powers. Ordinary people are not affected initially when it is sent back out into the world after a long absense, but the wicked are immediately strengthened. “The wavelength affects witches that lie dormant,” the book said to her, “and enemies that have been inactive for a long time begin moving.” Could it be? Was Emiline Vaklayrie’s previously dormant zombie soul risen because Crona, or Asura, had moved on the moon?

 

She finally found sleep once the sun had fully risen, slumped over her books and drooling onto the paper. It was then she would have her first surreal dream about Crona, in which her vision and feelings were vivid and enhanced.

 

She was submerged in the dark, sticky pool of madness she’d been in the first time she was infected with the black blood. She swam in the environment, lost for a long time, not seeing any souls or signs of life. Eventually, finally, the faint purple glow of Crona’s familiar soul came into her view, pumping and pulsing. When she got close enough to it to touch, she found it tinged deep red in the center, marked with three slanted eyes none other than those belonging to Asura.

 

Her dream self began to cradle the soul within her hands, the way she had when she had entered it the first time. But at that very moment, a ghostly white hand hovered over her shoulder.

 

She turned to find Crona in the long black gown, hovering before her. Her mouth was sewn shut with black blood thread, and her two eyes were shut, but a third eye, shaped like one of Asura’s, was open on her forehead.

 

“Crona,” Maka tried to wake the rest of Crona up, reaching out to touch her friend’s arms, trembling terribly. “Can you hear me?”

 

Instead of answering, Crona’s third eye began leaking black tears.

 

“Please,” Maka begged her, “how can I help you? Don’t cry.”

 

All of a sudden, Crona’s lifeless body was yanked back into the murky distance, like someone had her body tied to string and pulled her away.

 

“No, wait!”

 

Maka felt herself panic, turning around in hopes to still find Crona’s soul behind her, but it had vanished.

 

When she woke, she found herself hot and sweaty, and slick between her thighs like she’d just had a wet dream.

 

This effect was not lost on Soul, who had woken up before her. She stumbled through their bathroom grumpily and plopped down on the toilet, as he was just coming out of the shower.

 

“What’s up?” he said to his partner. “You have that look on your face like you just had a dirty dream you didn’t want again.”

 

She groaned. “It wasn’t one of those. Don’t be a pervert.”

 

“Well, what then?”

 

“I had a dream about Crona.”

 

It wasn’t that she was turned on by the horrific state Crona had been rendered in her vision. It was just that Crona’s body had been visible once more to her at all, and she had looked so _real._

 

Back when she and Crona first met, Maka had struggled with staring at other girls’ bodies and chests, comparing. The glimmer that it was _really_ about more than just comparison was something she tried to keep in the dark, but her fear was only made brighter when Crona came into the picture. Something about Crona’s gender nonconformity—she was a girl and she didn’t look like the models either, though it wasn’t that Crona wasn’t beautiful—Maka thought her neutral voice, flat chest and unbowed hips made her even more perfect, just right. The boys at the Academy had whispered and pointed and made fun of her, calling her a boy, and it was that hatred that had made Maka stare at Crona even further, memorizing her frame, loving every inch silently.

 

The comfort she used to find had immediately wanted to surface in the dream.

 

Before she realized it was a nightmare.

 

Later on that night, Maka and Soul reconvened at the end of their long day, undressing beside each other in their bathroom, getting ready for bed. Soul casually told her that “just in case she was wondering,” and she _was_ wondering if he wasn’t reading her journals sometimes or something, “she could totally explore her sexuality with a girl sometime, if she wanted to.”

 

“What?” Maka’s stomach turned at the suggestion. But it wasn’t like images of Crona, enhanced by her more adult sexuality, hadn’t been burning in her mind all day, intrusive. “No way, I mean, it’s not like I haven’t thought about it _a little,_ having friends as beautiful as Tsubaki, Liz, and Patty— Kim and Jackie, too—but it’s more like I wonder what it would be like to _be_ them, y’know. Since I have a wooden board for a chest and all.”

 

Soul’s eyes shifted there accordingly, and he licked his lips once, trying to hide his smile. She snapped her washcloth at his ribcage.

 

“Well, whatever you say,” he said, faux-nonchalant. “Just let me know if you end up changing your mind.”

 

A few days later, SPARTOI minus Kid and Liz was slated to have a Friday night out at the infamous Chupa♡Cabra’s downtown. Chupa♡Cabra was once a tiny, back alley dive cabaret bar run and staffed by witches in the Eighth’s District B-block. One of Death the Kid’s truce treaties with the witches included his heavy financial investments in their local businesses, so Kid, being Kid, made it a point to prioritize the resurrection of Chupa♡Cabra.

 

Decorated copiously inside with pink hearts and gaudy gold trim, Chupa♡Cabra is now a highly successful chain with locations high and low in Death City. By far the swankiest location, where everyone in the city hopes to gather, is the one closest to the DWMA in the First District. Having lost its reputation as a seedy “massage parlor,” the household name Chupa♡Cabra was now a well rounded experience: fine dining and bars, karaoke and arcades, gambling and casinos. In the early hours of the night, they represent the hope, wealth and happiness brought about by Kid’s new era.

 

After midnight, Chupa♡Cabra arounc the city became the 21+ “massage” and strip clubs of their past, in honor of their “humble” beginnings. Maka still thinks the franchise’s practice of this is horrifically sexist, even if she frequents the place herself for food and drinks because, well, everyone in town does. All the boys in SPARTOI would defend that the late night practices “create jobs for witches.”

 

Maka’s distaste of the male species that characterized her youth, on that note, hasn’t really gone away since she’s grown older. In fact, most days, she feels that it’s grown stronger. Even though Soul was a loving partner, in his way, and Black☆Star was _married_ to Tsubaki now, the two of them, some of the closest men in her life, still said and did things in their misogyny that shocked her, made her angry with the world. They always would, without really knowing it. That was their male privilege.

 

Tonight, she watches her guy friends on the other side of the club, slightly resentful of their way. Soul, Black☆Star, Ox, Kilik and Harvar look at the women out of the corners of their eyes just so, the way they sit with their legs wide, all the girls paying copious amounts of attention to them, the clearly rich and famous boys. They turn the girls down besides the polite handing of bills, smiles and laughter and hands-off conversation, but still, they have power in this room that they don’t recognize, don’t even care about.

 

For a moment she imagines the world turned on its head, and herself, Tsu, Patty, Kim and Jacqueline as the boys in the room, sitting with legs wide and having all the girls, and all the power.

 

Maka is drunk for the first time in a long time, she realizes soon enough. Black☆Star’s insistence on buying his wife and the SPARTOI girls round after round has more of an effect on her than usual. All of the gang lets loose so much that when the dancers flock around their well-known private booth at midnight, during discount hour, Black☆Star buys each of them a lap dance or six, and they take it, the alcohol allowing them to put hesitations aside and live while they’re young.

 

Maka is stiff and awkward when the club girls drape their hands around her shoulders and play with her pigtails, deigning not to tough any of them no matter how god damn objectively good they look, and they do to her inebriated and highly suggestive mind. Even as Soul looks over, gives her two thumbs up, signaling for her to go for something she wants. It doesn’t help that right after he gives her this sign, two girls in front of him unclasp their bras and drape them around Soul’s white head of hair, covering up his eyes. Her jealousy threatens to light itself on fire.

 

But suddenly, Maka’s vision is blocked by a very particular dancer approaching her, and well, visually stunning her. The girl has dark neon skin, choppy lavender hair, and big, soul-enrapturing black eyes.

 

All of which remind her much too much of that person she has nightmares about.

 

When the girl comes and straddles herself on Maka’s lap, one black bra strap falling clumsily down a shoulder, Maka is stupefied, but intrigued by the nostalgia she feels suddenly seizing her. God, this girl even _smells_ like Crona used to, rain and petrichor and storms and comfort—

 

“I know who you are,” the girl says, barely there and with a boyish lilt and rasp that favored Crona’s so intensely. “You’re the angel one, Maka Albarn. The girl who brought the kishin to its knees. You saved the world and all of us.”

 

Maka was horrified by how much she want she felt, suddenly.

 

“Don’t be scared.” The girl on top of her giggled. “Are you scared, lovely one?”

 

“You—“ Maka’s words threatened to die in her throat. “You look like someone.”

 

They end up making out on the couch, her hands-off policy long gone. When Soul notices them--she catches his eye across the room briefly--she finds the look on his face blank. In her drunk state, Maka can’t decipher it properly, read his soul.

 

As they leave the club that night, as a group, Maka stares up at the moon. No matter what she’s doing, or how much fun she’s having, she always stares at the moon.

 

When they get home, she knows that Soul is upset about the girl. Even though he said he thought he was okay with her trying it.

 

“It was one thing to fantasize about it," he eventually vents, "I thought maybe I’d think it was hot, totally go for it. But it was another thing watching you actually do it.”

 

“Soul, I’m sorry. You have to know, it didn’t mean anything—“

 

“Let’s just—talk about it in the morning, okay?”

 

At the break of dawn, neither of them having gotten any sleep, but pretending to, knowing the other knows:

 

“It’s about Crona," Soul says, "isn’t it?"

 

Maka's throat feels too tight to answer that.

 

“Sometimes I hear you say her name, when you’re asleep. I know you keep the window open at night to stay up late and stare at her. I always saw something between you two, but then she went all black blood crazy again, and you never got to figure out what you two had.”

 

Maka was crying then, pain seizing her chest.

 

“You know, if Crona had decided to stay,” Soul continued, trying not to sound hurt, failing, “sometimes I think you'd be with her instead.”

 

“That’s—” Maka sniffled, wiped her tears, tried to speak her mind. “What’s the point of obsessing over a question that has no answer? I have to accept that she may never come back. Does that mean I can’t find my own love and happiness? That wouldn’t be fair. She wouldn’t want that.”

  
Soul withdrew from her, she could feel it in his soul. The way it receded, curled back from hers, like she’d stabbed it.

 

“So you did love her, then?” he said to her. “You know, that way?”

 

Maka admitted defeat to herself.

 

“Always.”

 

They didn’t speak about the matter any more as they rose with the sun in the window; silence stilled as they maneuvered around each other in the bathroom, cleaning up for their six A.M. call time at the Academy.

 

And that afternoon, as fate would have it, Death The Kid called upon Soul to take a trip to Africa for nine months. At the staff and CIA meeting he held at the start of that month, he announced a new initiative to seek out the long-term effects of Madness all over the world.

 

“Those who were affected by Asura’s wavelength sometimes suffer from what I have now decided to term, Doubt,” Kid was saying to the meeting. “Think of Doubt as a depression caused by people having nightmares, hallucinations about what they saw in their madness. It starts to begin when they forget whether or not the hallucinations even happened in the first place. Years three and four of our World Peace have brought us clarity on the research about this subject. So, now we feel empowered enough to enact some ‘on the ground’ squads throughout the world, to observe and take care of our Doubt sufferers.”

 

“I just think, with the timing of everything,” Soul is saying, to Maka, somber, late that night in their bathroom, “we should take a break.”

 

“But, Soul—“

 

“No. Look at you, Maka. I don’t know what it is about the moon or Crona that’s affecting you so much, after all this time. I love you, you know that. But you need to back out and think about what you want.”

 

Soul took off for Zambia just two days later. Maka stayed, alone, teaching, soul searching. They barely wrote.

 

Her dreams about Crona become more and more vivid, more and more heartbreaking, and Maka stares out of the window despite all of it—at her—almost every night. But no matter how hard she strains, she can’t feel Crona’s soul wavelength behind the black crust around the moon. Mot even a ghost’s soul.

 

Usually, that means the person she’s reaching out for has no corpse, was completely disintegrated. Gone in the most permanent way possible.

 

Before he left, Soul fashioned Maka a scythe that was the about the same size as he was, all black and sleek, so she could project herself. Kid, also, had gifted her a white hoverboard with angel wings a few months prior. One night, in her dismay, she used both of these devices to propel herself towards the black sphere in the sky, high up within Earth’s atmosphere.

 

Still, up that close, she felt nothing, no wavelength, no signs of life. Her heart pounding, wildly, she swung her black scythe at the rock surface, chipping the blade and wearing herself out. No cigar.

 

That was one of the most hopeless nights of her life. When she came back down, it only got worse: her regrets that she hadn’t begged for Crona to come back down with them harder. She understood, she did, that Crona didn’t feel worthy, wanted to sacrifice herself for her transgressions. But what about Maka, down here on her own? What about forgiveness? What about love?

 

 

 

 

 

Present day, at Chupa♡Cabra, SPARTOI's having drinks and dinner, a calmer night than their usual. Maka is there physically, but mentally elsewhere. They are there waiting for Soul’s appearance, which should be any minute now. Maka's slightly dreading it.

 

And then, there he is: Soul walks in with hands in his pockets, weathered from his travels, but he looks good. Really good. Black☆Star practically tackles him, everyone else warmly embraces him. But Maka can feel the distance between two of them as soon as she sets eyes on him, and he makes eye contact with her. He finally gets to her at the end of all his greetings, and when he holds her, a litany of emotions overtakes her. He was the one who broke up with _her,_ anyway. He was the one who pushed her away.

 

Things won't be the same, will they?

 

Maka tries to avoid speaking with him specifically for most of the night, but Soul can sense this. Stubborn as always. As if she isn't. Standing back against the bar counter, Maka watches her friends play a game of drunk darts, and notes when Soul declines to play, gazing over in her direction instead. He joins her, adopting her position with his back against the bar, to catch up. It’s awkward. Maka was trying to avoid him because proximity makes her true feelings spill out, she can't help it. She's starting to feel like she has too many feelings.

 

"I'm glad you're back," Maka says, abrupt, in the middle of one of his sentences, "but I haven't forgotten that you dumped me on my ass when you left." 

 

Soul chuckles, nudging her in the arm. "Dumped you, huh? You wanna talk about this here?"

 

"Yeah. No. I don't know."

 

“It'd be great if we could pretend like everything’s cool, for now. While we're out. Okay?”

 

Soul leaves her side, after that. The rest of the night, he's joking around with Black☆Star, play fistfighting with Patty, in genuine spirits. Maka tries to put herself aside, be happy that her best friend is home safe. It works. For a while.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Soul?”

 

Back at the house, as Soul has just finished unpacking the rest of the things, they’re standing in their old bedroom.

 

“What’s up?”

 

Soul looks into her eyes, and no matter how old she gets, Maka’s always struck by the eerie, deep blood red of his eyes. It’s even more intense to her the older they both get, as she remembers how difficult it used to be to get teenaged Soul’s attention. To get him to stop drooling and horsing around and just listen. Now, his focus on her is razor sharp, almost too much. She wishes she could dampen it.

 

But Maka lets go, vents to him, because he's back, and he's her person. Seeing him here in their room again makes her want to believe that nothing's ever changed. She ruminates on what she felt earlier that day, when she talked to Stein in her classroom, about things in their life and their world almost going  _too_ well; that something about the world peace and happiness is becoming unsettling.

 

Soul laughs, says being too happy  _would_ be a thing she complains about. But he also says he knows what she means.

 

“Things won’t ever go back to the way they were, before that night on the moon.”

 

Maka feels it again, that pull to look out at the moon. She stares out of the window to their left.

 

“It’ll always be weird.” Her eyes well up on their own accord. “Feels like I’ll never get over it.”

 

Soul looks out the window for her, too. 

 

“In Zambia?" he says, in a soft voice. "They call the moon _mkombozi_. Means ‘liberator.’ It’s pretty cool hearing how the story about her has spread around the world. Every culture has their spin on how things went down during the battle. Over there they consider him, well, a _him,_ and have ceremonies thanking the moon every Sunday. Their views aren’t so hostile of Crona’s sacrifice, I guess because none of her Mad Blood killings ever happened there, like they did here and Ukraine.”

 

Maka imagines what Soul, her Last Death Scythe, must’ve been like to the people who he encountered there. A symbol to them of hope and change. Courage and laughter. She wasn’t feeling so similarly about herself these days.

 

“I have something to tell you,” Maka says, then. “While you were gone, I—went up there. To see if I could break her out.”

 

“Maka.”

 

“Nothing happened. I tried hitting it for hours, I—“ The embarrassment she felt as she tried and failed, exhausting herself that night, is paining her even now. “It was stupid. All I got was sore muscles and the dulling of that blade that you worked so hard to make me.”

 

Soul shrugs, smiles, shakes his head.

 

“Well, you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t try. I’ll look at the scythe tomorrow, get her back to her former glory.”

 

They get ready for bed, then, going through the motions of their old routine in the bathroom, skirting around each other in tandem. But Maka still feels the distance in their souls. Seeing Soul without his shirt on again so soon definitely isn’t helping things, either. All muscular and scarred, he’s everything like that strong man she used to get worked up over nightly. She misses his body.

 

When they come out and find themselves standing on the opposite sides of their bed, Soul pauses, says it without having to be prompted.

 

“Hey, I still don’t know if I wanna get back together yet. You’re my angel, always will be, and you know that I still love you. I just still need time and space to think about things. Alright?”

 

Maka can’t act like she isn’t disappointed. She wishes she could stop the way her soul is reaching out for his desperately inside her chest, the way she knows that he can feel it; she can see his rebounding her resonance slightly, reveberrating. Rejecting.

 

“Should I set up the bed in your room?” she says, noble. “I took your sheets off to wash the last time I cleaned a few...months ago. I still haven’t put them back.”

 

“Nah,” Soul says quickly, slipping into her bed, cool, “don’t sweat it. We’ve been sleeping in the same bed kicking each other in the ass for years. You’re wicked hot and all, but I can manage myself if you can.”

 

 _God,_ she thinks, silently cursing his mischievous grin, _such a typical Soul thing to say._ Begrudgingly, she joins him on her side of the bed, lying and staring at his bronze back as he turns away from her. His tough skin has been warmed, weathered and deeply loved by the Zambian sun. Her eyes soak in every single freckle and fleck that they can see, all in the proper places that they’ve always been, the ones she’s had memorized for twelve years.

 

When he turns over again to face her, she pretends she was asleep.

 

“You’re a bad faker.”

 

“Huh?”

 

When she opens her eyes, his are closed, but he’s smiling.

 

“C’mere.”

 

He reaches for her, a touch of his fingertips to her side, and she does what she used to when they were together; turns so that her back is curled up against his chest, his chin nudged slightly against her shoulder. With his strong arms around her, he finally sleeps. Unfortunately for her, she doesn’t.

 

The open window makes its haunting call, and she avoids the darkness in the sky for a moment, stares instead at her amazing view from the top of the city. The steep slopes of the buildings like silvery-blue mountains, the flat, blue expanse of sand off in the distance. The way that it looks like the world disappears into nothing beyond Death City.

 

She doesn’t want to look at the moon then, but she has to. The emptiness her soul feels as she looks tonight is crushing.

 

Crona's really gone, isn't she?

 

When the tears come burning, stinging their way through her eyes, Maka feels more frustrated with herself than ever before. Here she had gone and pushed Soul away, perfectly good Soul who’d done nothing but love her, in his way, and wait for her, because she'd suddenly lost herself in a moment five years past.

 

She would never forget Crona forever, but perhaps, it was finally time to close the window.

 

She picked the snoring Soul’s heavy arm up from off of her, tiptoed across the room. Pulled the thick, dusty drapes over the pane.

 

In the dark, then, returning within his grasp, she found rest.

 

Only to, just one hour later, suddenly feel pain, heavy and harsh, squeezing her chest, surrounding her soul. She lets out a soft cry from the weight of it, though it’s not enough to wake Soul entirely; he just frowns, groans a little as she untangles herself from him, stands to her shaking feet.

 

Something dark, ominous tells her,  _the window! the window!_  She swiftly tears it open.

 

The black of the moon is melting away, all liquid ooze. The jagged, grinning face of the old moon is tinged dark grey, dripping black blood from its rock teeth. Storm clouds grow, black rain falls onto the streets, staining her neighbor's roofs.

 

“Soul! Wake up!”

 

Her weapon starts at her shout, stumbling out of bed to be by her side.

 

“What the hell?”

 

Suddenly, the ground shakes terribly beneath them, a jolt of earthquake that knocks them both onto the ground, belongings on their shelves crashing. Maka grabs Soul's hand as it ends and they stand up, Soul equipping a blade on his left arm.

 

“You good?” Maka asks him.

 

Soul growls. “Yeah. You?”

 

She nods. Soul turns himself to full scythe form, she catches him, with ease.

 

“Okay," he says from the weapon. "Let’s go.”

 

“Go?”

 

“You’ve been wanting to know what’s up with her, right? Up close? I’d say now’s as good a time as ever.”

 

They fly off of the balcony of their mansion at top speed, Maka dodging toxic rain and sharp rock. Maka wears a black medical mask over her nose and mouth as they ascend to see what’s happening from a higher altitude. They can see the west of the country as pieces of what Maka realizes is coagulated black blood start to fall into Earth’s atmosphere. Hurling meteor-like shards through the strange black rain and clouds of ash.

 

They get level with the moon, but Maka can’t see a thing. The thick, stinging fog burns her eyes with tears. She and Soul can’t find their way to the moon by sight or light. But Maka swears, she can feel it: Crona’s soul, witchlike and pulsing. But where?

 

Why can’t she get a location? It’s like her location is all around them, suffocating.

 

“Let’s try getting higher!” Maka says.

 

Their attempt is useless. The atmosphere is so harsh, Maka feels too faint stay afloat. Against her will, Soul descends.

 

They fly immediately to the DWMA, which looks to be in full panic mode, rightfully. In Death’s room, which they enter holding hands vice-grip tight, they find their friends up in arms and amass with chatter, surrounded by security forces rifling through paperwork.

 

Rudimentary alarms are going off all around the building; Kid is speaking to the Death Scythe in West Asia about the situation in their country on his mirror. Black☆Star, Tsubaki, and the rest of SPARTOI are convening with army generals, no doubt going over emergency combat plans long dormant, just in case.

 

Liz, who serves as Death’s right and left hands these days, wastes no time approaching Maka and Soul as they walk through the chaotic room. She updates them on what’s happening around the world briefly, as she flies through the reports in her hands.

 

“Most of the liquid and shards from the moon’s dissolution fell in or around the major oceans,” Liz says, walking with them as they approach Death’s mirror. “But too much of it has made landfall for anyone’s fucking comfort. Storms and hurricanes have damaged the East Asian and African coastlines. The structural damage in America alone is outrageous. The California coast even had a black blood tsunami.”

 

"That's a thing?" Soul interrupts.

 

"It is now."

 

Maka’s head is spinning. Her eyes focus on Kid as he comes into her view, speaking calmly and somberly to someone in his mirror. She knows that this is bad, that as staff, she needs to care most about the fate of the world, but there's one question in her mind right now, and she just wants someone to give it to her straight.

 

“So far, there have been no casualties," Liz is saying, "but serious injuries. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide need to be evacuated. In the arctic regions, black hail rocks and snow are falling, and on islands, sea levels are rising. Still no word on if the rain is causing madness as we once understood it. Emergency teams have been sent out here in Death City.”

 

Dr. Stein approaches Death’s mirror in tandem with Maka, Soul and Liz, followed by a few researchers and excavators. Stein tells Lord Death, and everyone else in the circle, that Crona’s body was found on the surface of the moon.

 

“Is she—“ Maka’s voice breaks when she speaks. “Is she dead?”

 

Stein, ghostly pale, turns the screw in his head, smiling.

 

“Oh, no. She’s alive.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your compliments and interest in this story! Moving forward~

**CHAPTER TWO**

 

 

([Duct Tape by Chiodos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIYQnxiKrug))

 

 

Crona decided to become nothing, for Maka’s sake.

 

Fusing with BREW and Asura felt like Crona was falling asleep, very, very slowly. At first, she could see all of her memories playing themselves out backwards, fading into the darkness in front of her, becoming forgotten, until there were no more. Then, her body left her, too; skin liquidizing, Mad Blood dissipating, bones crumbling to dust, and brain separating itself into individual threads, like squiggling worms, swimming out and drowning.

 

There was no pain anymore. Crona was a void, no emotions, no thoughts. Just cold, coagulated blood, the hardened surface of the moon, knowing only that it existed, and nothing else.

 

After some time, however, the void sensed something: touch. A sharp pain, like someone knocking on her door, some awareness that she existed in a context, with at least one other living thing outside her crust. It was then that a consciousness began to inquire itself, then that the hard encasing knew that it was something else once; entirely, not just a solid. It couldn’t remember what that was, though.

 

What felt like moments later, the consciousness started to feel the hardness around it thawing; re-liquidizing, moving, shifting downwards with the weight of gravity. She was heavy, suddenly, a thick, downward movement of Mad Blood trying to force itself out, crack the surface of her hard encasing. It did. All at once, she felt a weight sifting from her around her form, a form she hadn’t even known was there; she'd forgotten she was so small. She felt worms, slinking and clasping to each other until they formed a mound, and then felt the black blood whirling and whipping around her, forming bone, tissue, skin, and hair.

 

And then, she felt her body falling through the sky, naked and soaked in black blood, until it landed on the surface of the white moon.

 

Blood filled her mouth, her head throbbing where it smacked against the ground. She couldn't move, the flesh and bones surrounding her feeling like a heavy, unfamiliar prison. Distinct muscles made themselves known to her, as each of them ached, and she knew which ones she should push to move, but could not. Vines with sharp thorns rumbled beneath her skin, tearing minute holes, letting watery black blood spill and pool around her.

 

In time, DWMA security forces surround her; helicopters and ships, harsh headlights, dozens of guns drawn. Crona watches the masked, blacked figures, her mind too new, too numb, to produce an emotion like fear.

 

“Do not move!" someone calls out from behind the white lights. "I repeat, do not move!”

 

Crona just stares at it all, giggling. She doesn't know why she finds this funny. She gurgles up more blood, coughing and hacking, and the forces descend on her at this motion.

 

She feels several of the armed men pick her up, bind her with her heavy chains. She doesn't know how to resist. Once she’s tied, one of them hits her in the back of the head so hard with the end of his gun, she blacks out.

 

 

 

 

 

They bring Crona to the Academy prison, underground, still in heavy shackles around her arms and legs, with a muzzle on her face. For hours, then, she is heavily guarded in the now unused solitary confinement chambers on the lowest floor of the DWMA dungeon. In a cell with no doors and no windows, no clothes on her body, she lies awake on the cold stone, just existing.

 

Outside, she can hear someone, lots of someones, by the door. She understands the words they’re saying, even if she doesn’t think she could form the words back to them.

 

"Lord Death," says the voice she recognizes as the guard, who threw her into the cell, "Doctor, Soul. The threat is contained."

 

“Thank you,” says Lord Death. “The plan for tonight is to give immediate relief and aid to those affected by the disasters. All communication and details about Crona should be limited, stating this and only this: the DWMA is doing everything in its power to determine the cause of the moon’s fall. Dr. Stein, what did you discover in your exam of her?”

 

"From my initial review," says the Doctor, "as long as she remains in the state she's now, she’s a non-threat. She can’t possibly attack anyone like this, and it seems that she can’t control the black blood any longer. I'll have to conduct further studies on the blood to determine how dangerous it may still be to humans. From there, I'll create and administer a drug to those saying they've been affected by the black rain. It appears that while there used to be two souls in Crona's body, meister and weapon, now there's just one. The demon sword that used to accompany her seems to be gone. There are no traces of the kishin, either, but we can be relatively certain that that's illusion. More than likely she's existing in some sort of fusion with him, as well as the demon tool, BREW, and The Book of Eibon.  What effects or what toxicity this is having on her exactly, we can’t be sure. However, we do know that no magic like this has ever been assembled in one being. Given that she carries all the wisdom of Eibon, that she’s half a witch, and that she’s holding the entirety of the Madness of Fear in her gut, she could very well become the likes of something we’ve never seen. _If_ her body survives the trauma. Also."

 

The Doctor pauses, longer than Crona remembers it's appropriate to pause in a conversation with others.

 

"If Asura really is still in that body, he’s probably plotting a way to get out. And fast.”

 

Lord Death's voice confirms that, apparently, there isn't much time.

 

"Civilian protests are happening around the city," Lord Death says, "calling for the 'terrorist’s' execution. I predict that, along with the physical damage she caused, Crona has likely let some mild form of Madness back out in invisible wavelengths. The potential for a new kishin to rise might be brewing out of the scope of our detection technology. It may take 800 years again, like it did last time. Only time will tell. If so, as Stein says, it might be a new kind of evil entirely.”

 

The only voice that hasn't spoken yet, Soul's, to that gives a self-referential:

 

“Her covering up the moon like that was kind of like putting a band aid over a cross-cavity wound.”

 

Suddenly, then, Crona hears running footsteps, a loud, female voice:

 

“I’m here. What’s going on? Let me see her. Now.”

 

And _oh,_ Crona knows who that is; she can’t put a name to the voice but her stomach twists up something fierce, jump startinganxiety and the sudden urge to break out of here, out of her shackles, in which she suddenly trembles. But she’s proves, again, to be too weak; a slit of skin slices open at the top of her spine, tries to form a hardened vine whip, but the projection of it splatters all over the walls. Crona groans.

 

There's a hard banging on the door in response.

 

“Crona? Can you hear me?” Then, to those around her: “Open up.”

 

The Doctor warns, “We aren’t sure what she’s capable of.”

 

“I am. If there’s anyone who can get through to her right now, it’s me. Or have you forgotten who saved us all from her the last time?”

 

A silence passes among the group, and then Soul: “You really think she’s gonna stop asking?”

 

The Doctor is the last one to speak, “Careful, now,” before the door opens.

 

 

 

 

Maka can’t believe what’s become of her once dear friend, doused in shadows, huddle in a corner. She's naked, covered in crusting black blood, and has to be less than a hundred pounds; bones protruding out from under her skin like knives, her lavender hair is tangled and matted with blood, not so much lavender anymore as it is silvery-blue.

 

Crona looks at her with still large, blue-black eyes, bruised around the sockets, the violet veins in them broken and bleeding. The iron muzzle hanging from the lower half of her face has rubbed some of her skin raw beneath it.

 

Maka is so shaken at this brazen look at Crona’s face and body that she has to turn away, gives the guards behind her an evil glare.

 

“God, couldn’t you have covered her up? How humiliating.” She holds out her hand, defiant, and snaps her fingers. “One of your cloaks. Now.”

 

With one of the cloaks in hand, Maka slolwy walks into the dark cell towards Crona, as Kid and Soul hold the security officers back with outstretched hands to block them. Soul is saying, “Trust her,” as Crona suddenly, to the surprise of them all, starts to stand up on her trembling legs, shackles jingling and clanking against the brick.

 

“Oh, Crona,” says Maka.

 

Maka feels Crona’s damaged soul wavelength lashing out against hers, causing a sharp clutching pain in her chest. Which she can stomach, because she’s used to this ability by now. But still.

 

“It’s me,” Maka says, wincing through the pain. “Do you remember?”

 

Crona opens her mouth, but a dry, crackling sound comes out instead.

 

“It appears that all attempts to communicate are lost, at least for the time being,” Dr. Stein says. “It’s been years since her tongue has had motor function, and we’re not yet sure what parts of her brain were reassembled when the blood re-coagulated.”

 

At this, Crona attempts to speak again, but it’s all coughs and scratches.

 

“It’s alright.” Maka is close enough to touch Crona, her heart beating wildly as she carefully wraps the cloak around Crona’s sharp, cold shoulders. “The important thing is that I’m here now, and I’m going to make sure we understand why this is happening. Okay?”

 

Crona bobs forward and passes out, collapsing into Maka’s arms.

 

The guards all jump forward, weapons drawn, but Soul yells out, “Hey, don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” as Maka fully supports Crona's body, no sweat.

 

“She’s unconscious,” Maka chastises them. “Stand down.”

 

She gently lowers Crona onto the floor. The fact that she's touching her, the fact that Crona is alive _,_ the fact that those dreams weren't all for nothing. Strong tears start brim her eyes, but she stops them. She doesn't want to have to let go. 

 

“I think that’s enough for tonight,” Lord Death says, though Maka still hasn't risen off of the floor.

 

"Maka," Soul says, gentle, behind her. "We have to go."

 

 

 

 

 

When Crona comes to again, her cell is pitch black, as before. Still muzzled, she’s on her knees, just having finished throwing up black guts through the muzzle's iron panels, shivering.

 

 _This is like that place,_ her internal voice tells her, _I was supposed to kill the little ones. Why couldn’t I have just killed the little ones?_

 

The thought of that person, maniacally laughing, standing over her, as she ate intestines in dark alleyways, Crona feels her gut wrench, like she’ll puke again. Somehow, she doesn’t. She’s grateful for the fabric suddenly wrapped around her shoulders, using it to wipe what she can off of her muzzle, but the cuffs on her arms are stiff and restrictive.

 

_How long have I been here?_

 

_What was that, that happened earlier?_

 

All that light, and those voices, those humans outside.

 

The beautiful girl with kind eyes, gold hair, and a voice like a dream.

 

She must’ve been a feverish hallucination.

 

 _Foolish child._ The voice inside Crona's head now belongs to that person, venomous and slithering. _You will always belong to me. Did you really think you could escape?_

 

Crona whimpers, trying to lift her heavy hands for her sliced-up, cartilage-missing ears. But no, she remembers now, that woman is dead. In her head, she suddenly sees the woman, impaled through the stomach with a black and white blade, then lying on blood-soaked, wood-paneled floors in three pieces.

 

_I killed her._

 

Crona hears it all again, the crack of that spine, the gurgling, the screeching. _I killed the little ones, but it was never enough for her._

 

Then Crona hears a different voice, low-pitched, barely-there, and rasping, like a trickster's.

 

 _I’m going to peel off all your skin and form a bag around your guts. Just like my father did to me._ The voice laughs. _Isn’t it fun, having mommy and daddy issues?_

 

Crona shakes her head, the muzzle rattling.

 

 _I don’t think I’d like that,_ she thinks back to the voice.

 

_Too bad._

 

 

 

 

 

Maka stands with Death The Kid, alone, in Lord Death's room, moments after they found Crona in the dungeon. The light clouds above her head, the blue sky-walls, the bright gold floors, and all the other notes about this room that have always meant to make it look less dreary, just annoy her at this rate.

 

This no time for light or happiness. 

 

"I want the muzzle gone," Maka is saying, harsh. "She's not some animal. She's a person. That you know."

 

The recipient of her tirade first won't look at her in the eyes, shamed and remorseful. He watches the clouds pass above them, his face reddening. Maka's patience is thinning.

 

"I didn't know—didn’t realize—" he says, "that they would treat her with such unkindness."

 

"Will she be getting a trial?"

 

"Of course."

 

"A fair one?"

 

"People want her dead for her crimes."

 

"You can't kill her."

 

Death The Kid, finally, sighs, and looks at Maka directly now, his gold eyes darkened slightly. He looks tired. Maka's patience somehow finds itself, remembers both how young they are, and how much responsibility Kid has had to take over the years. He doesn't cover his face, with a mask, the way his father used to. That way, you can see that he is at least _half_ human.

 

"You know I will do what I can," Kid says. "But you haven't stepped outside this room since the moon fell on the world. The anger, the fear, the Doubt, and dare I say it, the Madness that people are feeling is real. And strong."

 

Lord Death looks at himself in the giant mirror, and Maka stares at both of their reflections, behind him.

 

"I'm not just me," Kid says, more to himself, reciting it. "I'm the Academy. I have to do what needs to be done." 

 

She doesn’t know how the hell she’s going to focus on her work, with all this going on. All she wants, all she's wanted since the moon fell on the world, is to be with Crona. There's no way anyone is letting her back down there.

 

"Just promise me you'll go back to her call," Maka says. "Talk to her. Make her feel like she isn't alone."

 

"That, I can do. And you, promise me," Kid says, turning to look at her again, "that you'll get some sleep, before the trial."

 

 "Doubt it."

 

 

 

 

Death The Kid descends to Crona’s cell with a single security guard in tow, reconsiders the awful state the weapon girl is in. He’s brought with him soap and hot water, black handkerchiefs. When the heavy cell door creeks open, the smell almost doubles him over, and he’s sick with himself. That the Academy could treat a witch’s life, a human’s life, like this.

 

“I’m sorry about all this.” He kneels before her where she’s huddled in the corner beneath her cloak, somehow awake. “You must be exhausted. I can only imagine.”

 

Crona, when the door opened, felt her skin slice itself open in several places, weeping blood, the incisions stinging. Some defense mechanism. Gratefully, he is only removing the heavy muzzle from her face.

 

“Maka asked me to remove this. I should’ve had the sense to remove it myself.” The young Lord Death begins to wipe the crust from her face with his cloth. She trembles furiously at his touch, and it makes him ache, secondhand. “But, the situation out there is dire. There exists a hatred for you, and the kishin, that I can’t pretend isn’t dangerous, even if it is hard for me to believe. Perhaps because I’m too close to the situation, because she...”

 

Crona opens her eyes, her vision blurred, but she can see the outline of his strange, dark hood, its jagged edges. The three rings of white around his head, his glowing gold eyes. This is a face she’s seen before, maybe in a dream.

 

“She never forgot you,” he says. “None of us did. But especially not her. Not Maka.”

 

That name, _Maka._ That’s who that beautiful woman was, from before. Crona feels a warmth flooding her chest, despite her other pain, and a clouded memory forms: those last few moments on the moon, in all that darkness, before her life became cold and inanimate, Maka floated before her in a loose, white untucked shirt, the pleats of her skirt dancing in the black liquid surrounding them. Maka had finally come for her, after all that time, speaking about obsession.

 

Her fingertips touched white notes, lines of music, until she eventually faded into the dark.

 

“You were a good person,” Lord Death's voice cuts in, cutting out her memory. “A good person with very unfortunate circumstances.”

 

He stands up, and Crona closes her eyes again, wanting more of that memory. But it's gone.

 

“I will return with cold water, bread and butter,” he says now. “Your trial takes place tomorrow morning. Again, I apologize, and I hope, well—I hope that, through all of this, you find peace.”

 

Crona keeps her eyes closed as the door heaves shut with a cold draft, leaving her alone once again.

 

The voice in her head, this time, is her own.

 

_I was never a good person._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, work and school have been crazy this semester, but I am going to update this whenever I can!

**CHAPTER THREE**

 

 

([Always by Panic! At The Disco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7hPAhJGzRA))

 

 

Maka forwent sleep. Most of the members of Death's Central Intelligence Agency stayed at the Academy overnight, doing damage control in Death City.

 

The trial for the Demon Sword is set for early that morning, shortly after sunrise, before Friday school is in session. At 5:45 A.M., a crowd of a hundred have already begun protesting the dark stairs of the Academy with signs and rallying cries, up in arms. Some people feel strongly about Crona, the child of Medusa, being given a trial at all.

 

Maka sits with Soul, Black☆Star, and Tsubaki in the spectator rows of the DWMA courtroom. The room slowly fills with academy professors, CIA, criminal justice lawyers, and some citizens. There is a twelve person jury. Lord Death prepares to preside as judge up at the front of the room, talking to Liz and Dr. Stein in a low voice. As Maka was told by Kid a few hours earlier, Crona has no one defending her. The prosecution is a representative from the state government of Nevada.

 

The giant doors to the court are shut by two guards as Lord Death announces that court is in session. From a door at the right of the room, two more guards enter with Crona, still handcuffed, dressed in a black hospital gown. A few people whisper as soon as she's in sight; Maka thinks, as her heart races, that Crona looks better, her hair its more usual lavender, but she still looks exhausted. Shuffles along, head held low, as the guards place her in a closed off stand to the left of the judge's table, chaining her handcuffs to posts in the counter. Crona won't look up, but Maka reaches out with her soul wavelength.

 

The prosecution begins by listing Crona's charges from the state: first degree murder, forty two counts, vandalism, one hundred eighteen counts, voluntary manslaughter, twenty six counts, and disturbing the peace, one hundred thirty eight counts. Crona sits chillingly still through the long, long list against her. Maka is quietly fuming inside, becoming red-faced by the second. _Voluntary manslaughter?!_  Maka thinks. _Crona was tortured and mind-controlled by a ruthless killer! Three, if you count Ragnarok and the kishin!_  She tears up the little notebook she holds in her hands, viciously shredding its binding as Black☆Star whispers next to Soul "and you that all think I'm the one with the temper," which doesn't help. When she hate-stares her friend, he apologizes.

 

The first few witnesses called are several citizens who get on the stand and hurl to and about Crona, often yelling, as Crona continues to stare at the floor. Most of these people are political, anti-DWMA activists. Many of whom were no where near her Mad Blood spheres in Ukraine, who only heardwhat went on during the War on the Moon, who couldn't possibly have understood the life-and-death decisions that neeed to be made that night. These people posed the case that Crona is a nothing but a monster. Called her or sometimes "it" a freakshow product of the Academy's careless organization. Without thinking about the fact that she's been saving countless more lives, here in U.S. and around the world, by keeping the kishin withheld in her lifeless body for five years. Wasn't that punishment enough, Maka thought?

 

It's easy for Maka to be angry with these people, until the tone of the witness accounts changes when a certain citizen steps up. The woman is in her early twenties, poor, has tears in her eyes before she even speaks.

 

"I have a six year old daughter at home. Last night, she and my dog were asleep on the hammock in the yard. That black rain, that...that _poison,_ soaked her and my dog. The establishment, who had the _resources_ to, gave  _no warnings_ that that storm would be coming. She's sick, at the hospital, and we can't afford to treat her. My dog was put down an hour ago. My wife and I just lost our jobs at our county's electric plant. What are we going to do? Someone needs to be held accountable. Someone needs to pay."

 

The next woman is a someone who lost her partner last night when a black blood shard fell from the moon and crushed her house with him still inside. Maka's heart is broken. And Crona, though she still won't look a single soul in the eye, has started to react to these stories. Her wavelength trembles and stings against Maka's, which is still wrapped around Crona's soul to guard it from fear.

 

"It was involuntary." Maka can't help but speak her mind in a low voice; Soul looks over at her, puts his hand on hers, the pile of notebook shreds in her lap. "I know, people are dead. But it was involuntary."

 

As for defense, two professors and academics from the Academy have agreed to speak on Crona's behalf. One of those is Dr. Stein, but the first is Dr. Zuzu, a criminal justice professor, brain scientist, and witch.

 

"In the Demon Weapon's defense," Dr. Zuzu says the room, "Medusa Gorgon had a child, Death knows how, and specifically birthed, tortured, and engineered that child to become a deadly weapon. In the second round of surgeries, the subject had no remaining recognizable consciousness; the black blood was decaying her brain matter. Though the person you see before you is a young woman, at the time of the Mad Blood spheres, the War on the Moon, Crona Gorgon was still a minor. A child. She began to be forced, trained to eat souls, and murder when she was just four years old. And how do I know this? Well, besides the proof of Medusa's experiments, which I hold in my hands, I'm a witch. Lived with the Gorgon sisters in that commune a hundred and ninety years, those batshit ...excuse me. Those power-hungry snakes and arachnids and scorpions. You really think a child, any of us, for that matter, could've withstood the mind control of the eight hundred year old witches? Who singlehandedly brought about the worst era of history worldwide? Medusa might be dead, but that does not mean it is fair to pin the consequences of _her_  plots, and her crimes, on an innocent party. I ask the jury to find it in your hearts, somewhere, to think about your own children, the ones in your life. Think about how misguided and confusing adolescence can be  _anyway,_ let alone when you are locked in a basement, starved, and groomed by a killer."

 

At this having been said, the audience errupts in discussion; an activist who testified before stands up and starts shouting at Dr. Zuzu, saying that her argument is still no excuse for the property damage, lives lost, and terror, calling for the death penalty. Death The Kid calls for "Order, please, order!" as Maka practically shakes, squeezing the shit out of Soul's hand. "Don't do it, Maka," Soul says, "don't say it now. Wait 'til you're not pissed." She might, though.

 

Lord Death finally regains quiet and control of the room, and says that Dr. Stein will now give his defense. He says, "I think she said it all." Lord Death says the jury will be now given their twenty minute recess to discuss the statements from the court. At the break, Maka stands as she watches the guards remove Crona from her stand, pulling her towards the door she came in. Crona is panicked, on the inside, for all that her expression is blank. Maka has a strong soul, one in a million, in fact, and even she has a hard time resonating with feelings so dark. 

 

The recess feels like hours, to Maka. Lord Death finally reconvenes the court as one of the bailiffs takes the written decision of the jury from one of the members and brings it to the judge. Crona is brought back in and chained to the stand.

 

Lord Death opens the letter, reads it, and hesitates. Glances specifically to the row where SPARTOI sits, looking to Maka. She knows what that look means.

 

She won't have it. She won't.

 

"The jury finds that the defendant, the Demon Weapon Crona Gorgon, is—"

 

"Stop!"

 

Maka stands, voice escaping before she can even decide if she wants to do it. Some people in the audience groan, others whisper. 

 

"I demand that she have more time," Maka says, clearing her throat. "Three days, for more investigative work to be done. This court has no proof, no  _scientific_ proof, that Crona was of sound mind, under free will, or even _conscious_ when she committed these crimes. I demand—I demand that more testing be done, that Dr. Zuzu and the scientists who studied Medusa's work attempt a course of rehabilitation,until the prosecution can prove that _Crona_ herself acted maliciously."

 

"What more proof do we need?" says the prosecutor. "The damage outside, the piling graves—"

 

"Are proof that she committed murder, yes, but not  _voluntary_ murder. We all saw what Medusa's mind control powers could do, you haven't even given the defendant a chance to speak for herself—"

 

"Order," Lord Death says. He makes eye contact with Maka one more time before clearing his throat. "T-the court will take a ten minute recess."

 

The crowd errupts again as Maka sits back down, heat radiating all over her. 

 

"Dude, Maka, that was badass," Black☆Star says.

 

"You think he'll do it?" Soul says. "Give her three more days?"

 

"At the end of the day," Tsubaki says, almost a whisper, "he's still one of us. He was there when we saw who Crona really is. Alive. He knows the truth."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lord Death retreats to his judge's chambers during the recess, hoping to be undisturbed with thoughts. As per usual when this happens, Dr. Stein walks in, flicking the end of his cigarette into one of Kid's potted plants.

 

"That was some witch hunt out there," says the doctor, casual. "Literally."

 

"I don't know what the hell Maka was thinking." Death the Kid is elbows to the desk, face in his hands, ruffling his bangs. "But at the same time, I know exactly."

 

“Maka’s Grigori soul had incredible effects on the demon child first time she ever encountered her. And that was before Maka came to fully realize her abilities, the way she has now." Stein turns the screw in his head. "All that raw power...I think the only chance Crona has of living, and, more importantly, the only chance we have of Asura’s dissolution, is to let some of Maka’s healing magic do its work. What I told you hours ago still stands. If Crona's body is destroyed, Asura roams free.”

 

"Yes, but the fallout. From the people." Death sighs, fixing his bangs. "You heard them, saw them protesting the steps. What will the students say, when they arrive this morning?"

 

"I think most students know that Maka and the Demon Sword had a bond that was vital to defeating the kishin. Whenever stories about Maka are told, the story of how she rescued Crona from Medusa, the first time, follow not long after."

 

Death The Kid shakes his head, smiles slightly. “You do realize it's immoral to persuade a judge?”

 

Stein smiles too, shrugs. "Like I haven't done it before."

 

Lord Death reconvenes court, one last time, and defers judgment for three days, as Maka requested. Many people in the audience are surprised, and many don’t agree. Soul, Black☆Star, and Tsubaki overhear their complaints, of favoritism, which Soul has always understood as a valid criticism of Maka Albarn, but have they  _seen_ what she can do? Death The Kid hands Crona off to Maka at the front of the room.

 

After unlocking Crona's handcuffs, he tells Maka quietly, “You realize the risks of me temporarily pardoning a criminal, and the kishin, just because I have total faith in you. Don’t make me look foolish?” He asks it in good spirits though, smiling and holding out his fist for her to bump. She returns the gesture, but not without making sure she bumps his other outstretched fist, for symmetry.

 

Maka then looks at Crona, who is, with wide eyes, flexing and un-flexing her own hands, now that they're free of chains for the first time since she's come alive again. She's standing on her own, too, which is progress from last night, though she trembles, still horribly thin.

 

And all Crona can think about, as she's suddenly let go, is that she doesn't really remember the things that the people in court were talking about. All she knows, all she can see her mind's eye, is short visual clips from the moments themselves: the black blood errupting from her body, the pain, the blacking out afterwards, suddenly finding herself somewhere else. Coming back to herself in the middle cracking of ribs, intestines in her mouth, standing in corpses. What she can't remember is whether she or not she'd wanted to. Had she? Or had it been the serpent woman's voice in her head?

 

There is this other woman, too, this person, Maka; who stands before her now, warm eyes like honey, waiting for Crona like she's going to take her...home. Wherever that was. Crona still doesn't remember how she knows this person, where to place her, but something that tells her this is safe. 

 

Crona's voice, though still rough, has started to return to her. She discovered this morning whilst groaning through the pain of the thorns gurgling in her blood, and that caustic, cackling, male voice teasing her in her mind. Of note, this morning she spoke out loud to the voice, "Stop. I can't deal with this."

 

Crona is now beckoned by Maka, who offers her hand, following her through a hallway that steeps outside the courtroom. They're followed by Lord Death, and the boy with white hair who follows Maka most of the time. Crona remembers him too, maybe. She doubts that she’ll be able to speak to him, though, or even to Maka. She's terrified that this is some kind of illusion, some trick of black blood. That voicing any of this out loud will make it go away again. 

 

She has a moment alone in the hallway as Maka and the boy speak to Lord Death quietly. To test herself, to be sure, she speaks the name again, the one that is so familiar, she can't let go of it.

 

“Maka...”

 

 

 

 

Maka is glad for the rather private path from the school to their house, as they are just a few minutes apart. She has to be back at the Academy in thirty minutes to prep for her 7 A.M. lecture, but she knows she needs to take Crona to the house herself first, to get her settled, somewhere safe. Crona must return to the Academy later on this afternoon, too, as part of the terms of the agreement, where Dr. Stein, Dr. Zuzu, Nygus and a team of other scientists do a full body examination on her. Dr. Stein's top priority is creating the antidote for the effects of the black blood storm, figuring out the chemistry of how she consumed the Book of Eibon, BREW, and Asura in her, exactly. Proof they need if they're going to keep Crona among the living.

 

Soul looks unsure of all this as they exit through one of the Academy's back doors, avoiding the protests, Maka and Crona walking slightly ahead of him, silent, but hand in hand. But he also knows better than to argue anything about it at this moment. What was Maka supposed to do? There was nothing else she could've done, that wouldn't've also made her die inside.

 

Still, Soul keeps sending her serious "we need to have a conversation about this" looks as Maka unlocks the various gates in their front garden; Maka sends back her best “try me, bitch” to her weapon partner as she shows Crona through the great front doors, guides her up the stairs. Soul remains in the parlor, whistling as they go.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is technically Chapter 3.5, I ended up cutting 3 in half because I couldn't figure out this back half for a minute, but still wanted to get the courtroom scene up. But here this is! Apologies on how long this is taking me. I haven't read the Soul Eater manga in months now, and while I remember the plot entirely, sometimes I lose my footing with everyone's characterization? Just want to make sure it comes out at the quality I originally intended.
> 
> Chapters (now) Five and Six contain some segments that I'm having trouble with, but Seven and Eight are completely finished. Bear with me through this middle chunk lol
> 
> Shout out to ship captain [vriska](https://vriska.tumblr.com/) for the motivation, you da best

 

**CHAPTER THREE.FIVE**

 

 

 ****([Always by Panic! At The Disco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7hPAhJGzRA) )

 

 

Crona is very curious about the contents of Maka’s bedroom. There is _so much_ of everything; for starters, it is very light in here, the double-paneled window open, letting the morning sunlight shine, billowing the cream curtains in the breeze; several wicker bookshelves full of worn titles, a beautiful wooden desk, a closet full of dresses, an armoire with ivory skull knobs. Crona doesn't know why, but the scent of this place - not one she can exactly peg, just one that is familiar - is doing something to her mind, transporting her somewhere else. She is suddenly much younger, a child of maybe twelve, books in her arms, and she can see a golden hallway full of other kids stretched before her. Maka, also younger, smiles and leads the way for her.

 

This adult version of Maka is making arrangements for her, now; unlidding a jar of white chocolates for Crona to eat, changing pillow covers, pulling back sheets, laying out some of her own clothes, a soft white t-shirt and matching cotton pants, for Crona to change into. Maka tells Crona that she is welcome to the soaps, shampoos, and towels in the bathroom - _what's a bathroom?_ Crona thinks, wincing just as Maka opens the door to their right and shows her the white tiled space. Maka asks about this and that, "Do you want to keep the window open? Are you comfortable?" and Crona can only communicate with nods or shakes of the head. The thought of using her voice in front of this person, or anyone really, still makes her horrifically nervous. She's afraid no one will understand her.

 

Maka tells Crona that she will be right back, and goes away, leaving the door slightly ajar. Crona shivers - it isn't cold, but a wave of chills washes over - when she realizes that she is alone in a place that is not going to hurt her, is not dark, and will not make her starve. It's almost scary, the brightness, the solitude. Crona decides that she needs to keep looking at stuff, keep her mind filled with observations, keep the voice from going off on her, so she takes a closer look at one of the shelves of the armoire. Silver chains of jewelry hang from iron tree hooks and several marble saucers are filled with plastic containers of colorful liquids. One of these saucers is filled with tiny metal prongs and similar devices, dull tipped, not useful if they were weapons or devices of torture. There is one though that looks at least potentially dangerous; looks designed to fit around a person's eye socket, complete with two handles that, if they were pressed, could pinch the eye and squeeze it pulpy, maybe pop it. Does this Maka have a penchant for destroying people's eyes, maybe to get information? Crona doesn't know how to deal with this.

 

She pokes at the tinny device, jumping at the cold feel of it on her skin. She picks it up between two fingers cautiously, her hand shaking. At that moment, Maka returns to the room.

 

"Ah!"

 

Crona drops it to the floor, and Maka's eyes follow where it fell as she places a basket of bread and water pitcher she brought up with her on the desk. Maka then smiles sideways. "Oh, that? It's just an eyelash crimper."

 

Eye _lash._ So not actual eyes. Crona tries to stop her shaking, but it won't quit.

 

"Here," Maka says, "I'll show you."

 

Maka comes closer, retrieves a small handheld mirror from one of the armoire shelves with her white gloved hand, and the still trembling Crona can see the details of her face here - each individual hair of her brows, faint speckles on her skin, flickers of dark green in her eyes. Holding the mirror with one hand, Maka takes the little trinket from the floor, levys it open, watches her own reflection, and prepares to cinch her eyelid.

 

"No, please - won't it - won't it hurt?"

 

Maka drops the crimper, turns to Crona suddenly.

 

“Crona! You _can_ talk!”

 

Crona can feel the black blood pushing and surging through her chest, so hard.

 

“I... um....”

 

“It’s okay, take your time. I’m just so glad to hear your voice again.”

 

  _Again._

 

"I really should get going," Maka says, putting the mirror back on the shelf. "You can use that mirror there to contact me at The Academy if anything goes wrong." Maka steps aside to grab a yellow piece of sticky paper and a pen from her desk, writing on it a sequence of numbers and dashes. "Draw the shapes of the numbers with your finger on the mirror."

 

Crona isn't sure she understands that direction, but she nods.

 

"I'll be back during my lunch break, five hours from now, and then again after classes, nine hours from now." Crona isn't sure she understands that either - time doesn't exist when you don't exist, and before, when forced to kill, she was not allowed to know for how long she had been conscious - but Maka seems to already be ahead of this, pointing out the ticking circle above the bed. "The small hand is the hour. It's almost seven. When it reaches the twelfth mark at the top, I'll be here."

 

Maka leaves once more, still leaving the door open just a touch. Crona isn't sure that she wants it hanging open, but closing it makes her fear that it will never open again. She stands in the middle of the room, the black blood coursing through her heart quickening, pumping, seizing her with pain. She feels tears and slits open up across her chest; through the rough black smock that she still wears from the courthouse, the black blood leaks, streaming down her stomach in rivulets. 

 

That rasping voice returns in her head:

 

_She hates you! She's never coming back._

 

Crona's stomach suddenly lurches; she feels vomit, bile, or some combination rushing from her throat and runs into the bathroom. Misses the toilet a little, on her knees, but hacks most of it into what she suddenly remembers is the only place that it belongs. She stays there, arms circling the toilet seat, for an amount of time she cannot process. Lets her sweating forehead rest against the cold ceramic, breathing slow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maka hopes that Soul isn't still waiting for her when she gets downstairs, but she knows her stubborn loyal weapon partner better than that. Soul stands at the bottom of the staircase, whistling a song, watching her come down. She knows that he can feel it in her soul wavelength, that something happened - Crona  _spoke,_ that soft lilt, the one Maka has dreamed about - she's still glowing from even just that small sound of it.

 

"What's with that look on your face, professor?" Soul says, not bothering with the wavelengths of it all, the deeper stuff.

 

Maka exhales. "Words. She can talk. She talked to me."

 

By eleven that morning, Maka is eight cups of black coffee deep and this is the longest working day she thinks she's ever had to live through. No students ask or speak to her directly about the Black Moon falling or the criminal trial, which some of their parents might've attended, or certainly heard the news about - the only thing she says, briefly at the start of her classes, is not to worry: that the DWMA is doing everything in their power to both bring justice about this worldwide event as well as treat Crona humanely. 

 

Maka has been awake for nearly forty hours by the time she's walking back to her house for her lunch; only adrenaline and determination are keeping her standing now, and she isn't even tired - she knows she  _is,_ but she doesn't feel it - as she goes around the kitchen, cooking minute rice and microwavable steamed buns, careful not to overcook them, to bring up to Crona in her bedroom. Crona never called via the mirror, but Maka expected that - she closed her eyes periodically throughout the day, located Crona's specific soul, fluctuating purple, on her wide-stretching soul map. Sitting inside a room of her house, barely moving. 

 

Crona is sitting on the floor with her back turned to the doorway, knees curled into chest, white clothes on her thin frame, when Maka enters the room. Some of the bread has been touched, a careful bite taken out of three loaves exactly, but only that. Two of the white chocolates were unwrapped. 

 

"Hey, Crona," Maka says, and she's relieved that her entrance hasn't startled her old friend, like it did this morning when Crona thought she was caught red-handed for innocently perusing make-up tools. "I brought you something else to eat. It's not great, I'm a terrible cook, but I actually didn't burn anything for once."

 

Crona stands, then, staring at the plate in Maka's hands. She takes it from her, and then sighs, small.

 

"I don't know if I can eat it," she says, frowning. "It smells nice, but the blood doesn't like it when I try to fill my stomach."

 

Maka sets the plate down on the desk, making a note to tell Stein this detail later on. How long can Crona subsist without nourishment? Her ribs were distended when Maka saw that glimpse of her body in the prison cell. Perhaps a long time, though. Possibly years. Her body did stay on the moon for that long, somehow survived without consuming a single thing.

 

"That's okay," Maka says.

 

Crona had yet to make eye contact, until Maka said this. Now, she looks on, dark blush creeping onto her face. Crona is so  _tall,_ Maka notices, taller than she was before by almost a foot.

 

"I'm... very boring," Crona says now.

 

Maka loves this; not that she thinks it's true, but the fact that Crona doesn't seem to be shy about speaking anymore, full sentences, self-aware comments as before. Silly, a little, without realizing it.

 

"Why do you say that?" Maka asks her, smiling.

 

"I haven't done anything since the small hand was on seven." Crona fumbles with her hands, glances down. "I don't know, it doesn't feel like I know how to do anything."

 

Understandable, seeing as how she's only existed in corporeal form for hours now. 

 

“I can read to you, if you want," Maka says. "When we were in school together, you enjoyed my favorite book series. I have copies in the library downstairs. Wait for me here?”

 

Maka rus through the quiet echoing house to the library, grabs the seven volumes from a special spot she's memorized in the thousands of rows, stacking them clumsily in her wrought arms. Maka’s favorite book series was and always will be _The Dark Side of The Moon_ by Lorda Dun-Sany.

 

Maka returns, sets the books up on the desk, bringing the first -  _The Dark Side of The Moon: Part One -_  to Crona and showing it to her. Maka goes to sit on the bed, and Crona stares, almost sad, uncertain. Maka tells her, “It’s okay, you can sit.”

 

Crona lets herself drop into the sheets, but immediately stiffens and retracts herself upon feeling the way it gives and dips at her weight. She frowns, her trembling hands stretching around the bedspread, and then she clears her throat.

 

“It feels too soft, like I’m going to sink into it and fall forever.”

 

Maka responds to this by bouncing on the bed a couple of times. Crona watches her do this, and the closest thing to a smile Maka has seen on her friend's face tugs at a corner of her mouth.

 

"See?" Maka prompts. "No sinking."

 

They read for a half hour, Maka reciting every word and Crona staring up at the ceiling, but occasionally watching Maka closely, and Maka is so flustered. This is like one of her dreams, this is a dream, right? Can she pinch herself? Except this time, it’s not ending in nightmarish fashion. Crona is alive. Not so well, but alive. The book could not be more deep and meaningful at this point in her life, either - her love of it as a child has seemed to foreshadow the moon’s significance in her adult life now. 

 

The protagonist of  _The Dark Side: Part One_ is a small boy from a fantasy world who thinks he's found someone living in the shadows on his planet's moon. The story is a romance, at its core, the purest kind. Reading it now, Maka plays through some of her memories of she and Crona as playful students. Knows without a doubt that what she and Crona were experiencing back then was a teenage crush, the longing kind. Those high school rose-tinted scenarios she’d always wanted, all shy hand holding, hand-written notes and packing Crona’s lunchbox for her special every morning, the way they had always been so touchy-feely, not in the rough and aggressive way that she and Soul always were, even if their classmates and everyone around them wrote it off as “two girls being overly friendly.” It wasn’t only that. It was more.

 

 _The Dark Side: Part One_ is about the boy's future abilities to control time as he knows it. In the first couple of chapters, he discovers his abilities, allowing himself pauses to discover more about the moon person. Just like how, now, Maka and Crona have this stretch of time before them; hours, each minute precious. Now Maka was twenty three, and this wasn’t the time to pretend like a romance between she and another girl was impossible when she was young. Now was the time to go back to it, accept how it was. It's different now, and Crona is cold, doesn't remember, at least not consciously, and may not ever again. Even if Crona appearing before her now is only to say goodbye, for closure.

 

Maka pauses at her favorite point in chapter five, where the boy goes on a sidequest adventure with his band of rowdy friends.

 

“This part always reminds me of Black☆Star, Tsubaki, Liz and Patty," Maka tells Crona. "When we were all just starting out, before SPARTOI, we ran off on all these filler side adventures together that were actually pretty pointless, now that I think about it. Do you remember them, my friends?”

 

Crona shakes her head, gentle. “Not really. I’m sorry.”

 

Some part of Crona did know, however, when she saw each of their serious faces in the crowd at the trial, that she’d seen them somewhere before. Maka, Soul, and Lord Death had been the first familiarities, and these others were blurred and fuzzy in her head. She couldn’t piece together any real moments, the how or the why.

 

Maka looks above them at the clock. 11:45. She has never wished so hard, in child or adulthood, that she possessed the boy from  _Dark Side's_ time powers.  

 

“It's time for me to go back,” Maka says, and Crona nods. “Aren't you tired? I know you've been awake as long as I have, and I'm known to either crash or start raging at everyone - more than usual anyway - at forty eight hours plus. Maybe you can get some sleep.”

 

But Crona says to that, somber and plain,

 

“I don’t know how to sleep.”

 

Maka assumes Crona is only saying this about her five-years-later state... but then it occurs to her that in all that time they spent together before, Maka did not ever actually _see_ Crona asleep. She could only assume, when she left Crona alone in her dungeon bedroom with Ragnarok every night, that she got eight hours of shut eye just like any other regular kid. But did she ever? Medusa could've constructed her chemistry so that it was not conceivable.

 

Maka goes, then, pocketing two of the microwavable buns and chewing them on her way out of the bedroom, and Crona misses her. Only wants to find out how the closed book about the boy and the moon person goes on if Maka is reading the tiny, tiny print, that makes Crona's eyes and head hurt to stare at. 

 

Soon as the iron gates outside shut, and Maka has conceivably left the premises, Crona feels her stomach twisting once more. She runs to the bathroom to hurl again, doesn't make it to the toilet this time. The black blood spews a mess, everywhere. She spends the rest of the hours Maka is gone cleaning it, until the room is spotless, again.

 

 

 

 

 

Five that afternoon, Maka watches from behind the glass windows of the central operating room at the DWMA; Stein, Nygus, Dr. Zuzu, and two other surgical nurses are wearing full body suits with masks, to protect them from the wavelengths Crona's open cavity could emit. Maka doesn't know how she's able to stomach watching this show, but _not watching_ would've been way worse; Soul advised the doctors, as he did when Maka insisted to be taken down to Crona's cell, that Maka was not going to take a "no" to observing the surgery lying down.

 

Crona's face is covered up, which allows Maka to sort of distance something a little, but it's still as mortifying watching them work as it is scientifically _intriguing_. They've sown Crona's posterior back up, after removing tissue samples from various organs, extracting vials of black blood, x-rays and MRIs, and now they have carefully turned Crona's body onto her stomach, making a new anterior incision. Maka watches in mild horror as they remove what’s left of Ragnarok’s crumpled, pulpy body from the base of her neck, place him into a silver tin to dispose.

 

Until Crona was under a very strong dosage of anesthetics, lying on the operating table and staring into the doctors' faces, to say that she was having vivid, vivid flashbacks to something she didn't even know she knew before -  Medusa experimenting on her while she was awake, and going through all the pain - is an understatement. Though, her own voice tells her in her head, this room is not that place: she looks over moments before Nygus gently tells her that the sleeping drugs are about to be administered, that she's going to feel something cold, and sees through the glass paneling to the observation room. Only Maka is there, among the row of twenty chairs, her gold eyes stable and strong.

 

As Crona recovers in another room, Stein gives Maka the results of their findings from the surgeries.

 

"Looks like, as anticipated, her physical body does not show any signs of Asura's residence." Dr. Stein lights a cigarette in the hospital hall, and does he _care_ that that action breaks every rule a good doctor should uphold? No, he never has. "The Madness of Fear, which Asura instigated, was found dispersed through her body, but not _him._ He must be somewhere in her mind. Not her brain - no grey matter will reveal his illusion - but her thoughts. You can't exactly kill thoughts, not without removing the parts of her brain that allow thought in the first place. Given her openness to you this afternoon that you described, the fact that something of her personality has returned, that is obviously not an option here. The blood and tissues samples reveal traces of BREW and The Book of Eibon running through her, but their properties are masked, dormant, under the black blood's grip over her cell matter. Whether or not BREW's magical properties in particular can become dominant, is...well. The black blood has grown more aggressive, much stronger, as Ragnarok was once the filter that kept her human and witch anatomy strong enough to withhold the substance eradicating her from the inside out. Now..."

 

"Now?" Maka wishes he wouldn't go about this so slowly. "Why did you take Ragnarok out if he was her filter?"

 

"Ragnarok is already gone. All that was left of the demon weapon was rotting tissue. We did her a favor, actually, getting rid of it. Less weight on her shoulders. Literally, figuratively."

 

She can sense that he’s trying to sugar coat things, again. Though she appreciates the detail of his report, his sheer knowledge. Really. She needs to know _the point._  Right now. Brutal honesty.

 

“Will she live through this?”

 

“I don’t know. Complete transfusion or replacement of the black blood with red blood, human or witch, is...well, it's just too risky. It might not take, and even if it does, she might go into shock, or just not recover. Organ transplants would be required, too. Every organ.”

 

Maka does not, will not cry. Medicine is strong evidence. But it is not everything. Miracles, impossibilities, turns of fate - they're real. She knows. She's lived them.

 

"Something," Maka starts to say. "There has to be something. Her soul can fight back."

 

"There could be." Stein ashes his cigarette on the wall, flicks it to the floor. "In the meantime. Keep her close."

 

Maka follows the orange light from the sunset, gleaming in through the hallway windows, to the quiet room at the end where Crona is recovering. She's still asleep in the lofted bed, bandaged thoroughly, though this era's medical technology, the stitches used - thanks to Kid and his innovations - should seal her incisions to a great degree in a number of hours. Maka places her hand over Crona's, watching her friend just breathe. Two more days of this - the formalized reports from Dr. Stein and Zuzu's team and work today will be generated, given to the prosecution and the jury for review. Crona can survive, if Maka can stop the rising of the spiritual guillotine society has raised over their heads, set to drop all too soon. Maybe.

 

Meanwhile, Crona is not entirely unconscious, lying in bed. Her darkened, scarred and damaged soul is moving, vulnerable to healing, against the Grigori soul in close proximity to it. Exchanging gases, energies, they both are. The Grigori soul has tough and toxic work ahead of it, but it goes on, one moment, one layer at a time. Crona is dreaming, or something like it: in the underground of the Academy, long ago, Crona and her partner Ragnarok faced off with a skinny girl in pigtails and plaid, her ravenous, black and red scythe. Crona consumed them both, in a sticky pool of black Madness. While this was going on, internally Crona was standing on a very arid beach. Somehow, though it had only been Crona and the shadow before, the girl with pigtails - Maka - had found her way inside the beach to bother them. Crona freaked. Maka persisted, with the power of friendship. Something changed, after that moment, permanently. Crona remembers it, now...

 

Maka is almost asleep sitting up - coming up on forty eight hours, crashing on the horizon - when Crona wakes up from the anesthesia. Some energy from a source Maka wasn't even sure she could muster rises up, working through the twitching in her eyes, her body vibrating against her will. 

 

"Hey, cutie," she says to Crona's blinking face, going out on a flirtatious and clearly sleep-deprived limb - what is  _wrong with her, Crona just had major surgery -_

 

Crona's eyes widen. "...Cute?"

 

"Yeah, you are cute." Might as well run with it, dig the grave even deeper. God, she needs to sleep.

 

Crona does it, though, after this impossibly long day - actually smiles, soft and dimpled. Maka will probably die before the two days is up. 

 

"Thank you," Crona says. "I think."

 

"How are you feeling?" Maka snaps out of the haze, somewhat, the bandaging all over her friend and the visions of what she saw before - Crona's body like a cadaver she's observed medical students in that same theater poke around in all bloodthirsty - flooding her memory. 

 

"Uh...I don't remember," Crona says. "The doctors told me to count from ten, and I was only at seven... Now I'm here."

 

"Yeah, that's how surgery's supposed to feel." Maka hopes that wherever the shreds of Medusa's wretched ghost is, it's eternally suffering. "We should be able to take you home soon."

 

"I...remember something." Crona flexes her fingers in Maka's, leans back. "You say we knew each other. I remember something. The little beach with no water, in my head. The shadow who could talk to me. You were there. You...you scared me, but you erased my line in the sand. After you held my hand, the ocean came. And it...and it stayed."

 

Okay, now Maka's crying.

 

"What?" Crona retracts her hand. "Was it something I said?"

 

Maka takes it back, holds onto it tighter.

 

"I'm just really happy you're here." She sniffles, laughing at herself. "I'm sorry I'm a mess. While we wait for your discharge, I brought  _The Dark Side_ to read to you again..." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's nearing nine when they've gotten back to the house. Crona has recuperated enough to walk around, limping, though, and Maka can see thorns, gurgling black blood vines, trying to vie their way out of Crona's skin. She mentally forbids them from doing so, and it seems to work. For now. Crona goes into the bathroom immediately, and when Maka pokes her head in through the open door to check on her - Crona is kneeling in the corner by the toilet, seemingly scratching at something with her nails - Crona clams up, looks mildly horrified. Insists that she needs privacy, so Maka goes, closing the door for her. In a few minutes, Maka hears Crona running the bathtub water.

 

Maka goes downstairs, then, to find that Soul has cooked dinner - chicken teriyaki, actual rice that doesn't take five minutes to cook, a stunning array of grilled vegetables - God is her stomach going to be glad he's back. He's shoving his face via chopsticks with what has to be a second or third plate, drippings of sauce getting onto the student papers he's grading at the dining room table, and she snorts at his ways. He throws a pencil at her and she catches it, tucking it behind one ear. There is no way in hell she's going to last much more than two hours trying to stay awake, at this rate. Still, she doesn't want to sleep until Crona is out of the bathroom. Maka fixes herself a plate, realizing that all she's eaten is two sticky buns, and that isn't helping her exhaustion any. She decides to try and get some work done while she eats, too, removing reports from her briefcase and scattering them over the couch as she piles chicken and rice into her mouth. At some point, she falls asleep doing this - not for long, and only wakes up because Soul pokes her in the cheek with one of his chopsticks.

 

"Crona doing okay?" he asks her, spinning the chopstick in his fingers.

 

"My bathroom." Maka's grumpy. She shouldn't have been sleeping right at that moment, but if it was already happening... "Taking a bath. For the last..." she looks at the grandfather clock on the wall. "Hour? I think. I don't know."

 

She doesn't like not knowing how long, so she recollects her papers to put in her briefcase, dropping them several times as Soul places her dishes into the sink for her. He watches her tragic exhausted display for a moment before chuckling and carrying the overstuffed briefcase for her, offering his hand to help her dozily make her way up the stairs.

 

He doesn't walk into her bedroom though, even if she leaves the door open behind her for him to. He hangs out in the doorway. Maka finds that her bathroom door is still closed, the light is on, and she can hear water slinking against the tub. She starts moving pillows around, rearranging them just to do it more than it is for any actual reason, getting more from her closet, dressing them with pillowcases. Soul watches her.

 

“Let me guess,” Soul says to her, “you’re having Crona sleep in here with you tonight?”

 

Maka continues stuffing the extra pillows, her face immediately burning.

 

“It’s not like you were all that excited about sleeping with me in here,” she offers.

 

“Don’t know where you’re getting that from.” Soul shrugs. “You’re the one who wanted to set up my bed.”

 

“Yeah, because the first thing you said to me the second we were alone was that you didn’t wanna be with me anymore.”

 

“Look, it was something I could’ve gotten used to again. Maybe. Alright? But now, I’m here for one night, and...”

 

The _you’ve replaced me_ is implied by his restless shifting, the roll of his eyes. Maka’s heart hurts.

 

“If you didn’t want me bringing Crona here, which I  _knew,_ you should’ve said something. I hate it when you’re passive aggressive.”

 

“Me? Maka, you’re the _queen_ of passive aggressive.”

 

“I am not!”

 

“And even if I’d said something, she’d still be here. When you put that mind of yours to whatever, there’s no stopping you.”

 

“She needs me right now. She needs _us._ When we left her on the moon, you were supportive too.”

 

“She’s been gone for five years. That kind of isolation, we don’t know what that can do to a person. It’s not that I don’t love her too, you know much I cared about her in the end. But I don’t know how safe it is for you to be locked up with her alone in here, so soon. Stein told me what they found out too, you know. There's a reason they went full mask in that operating room.”

 

Maka flinches at this. “Crona would never hurt me. If _that’s_ what you’re so worried about.”

 

“She’s somehow existing after swallowing Asura whole. We haven’t seen him, so for all we know, that asshole’s still inside her. _He_ could hurt you.”

 

Soul goes on to warn her that her Grigori soul could very well not be the heal all to this, as powerful as she is. Maka knows, she _knows_ this, but she doesn’t want any bad energy from them speaking that fact aloud to reach Crona in the house. “We have to stay positive. She can sense it when we aren’t.”

 

Soul appears to throw his towel in, then, but his red eyes find the clock on Maka's wall.

 

“She’s been in the bathroom a long time.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The surgical anesthesia was no real match for the black blood. Though it placated her briefly, gave her something like euphoria for the two or three hours that she waited for her discharge, once it wore off, Crona's self loathing was back with a vengeance.

 

It started off slowly - Crona was told by her own inner voice that she must've left some tiny little splatters of black vomit in Maka's bathroom, even though she'd spent four hours cleaning every inch of the floor before Maka returned to take her to the Academy. This nagging wouldn't let up, and lo and behold, when Crona went to inspect the bathroom, she found some black dots around the base of the toilet. She didn't want Maka to know the rancid extent of her sickness, so she let Maka close the door behind her, glad for it. The faucets and plumbing were something she understood the entire purpose of now, so she ran the bathwater, hoping that this would distract Maka from knowing what she was actually doing. It also helped mask the noise when - apparently Maka left the room to go to another floor of the house, put some distance between them - her stomach twisted again and she threw up into the sink. Though her double incisions from the surgery were nearly closed from the supernatural stitches, they ached as she retched.

 

 _I'm coming out,_ the rasping voice told her head.  _I don't care if your sopping flesh bag is in my way. I'll rip it apart. I'm coming out._

 

"Please don't."

 

Crona decided to actually get into the bathtub, then, after thoroughly washing the sink out. The bath water was much too hot, so she drained it and let it fill up again. Stood naked and staring at it for a moment first. The clear water was much different than the blue ocean she dreamed about before she woke up from that surgery. It looked...not very inviting. Still, she lowered her body into it, hugging her knees to her ribcage. Her nausea seemed to have subsided, but now other pain subsisted. The black thorns poked holes into her skin, streaming the water with black, and Crona panicked, turning the faucet back on and trying to drain the greyish stew until her bath was clear again. There was no point in doing this; her body just kept leaking, it wouldn't stop, and so soon, she started crying. 

 

Soul and Maka stand before the closed door. The water is running again. Soul steps back, so that he couldn't see inside the room if he tried, and Maka opens the door and looks inside.  Finds Crona sitting in the bathtub crying, her hands pressed against her eyes, the tub water overflowing and mixed with black blood, spilling out onto the floor.

 

Soul leaves.

 

"Crona?" Maka says.

 

Crona doesn't say anything, react much. Maka hesitates, this view of Crona's skin, even just her back, giving her very cautious pause. The murky water soaking her socks asserts her back into action though, and she walks to the side of the tub and shuts off the faucet. Crona's expression, her large eyes watching her every move, is a lot more subdued and vulnerable than Maka imagined it might be. She's crying a little still, but appears to be nearly dried out. Maka quickly realizes that the water is grey because Crona's skin must've slit itself open again at some point; it seems to have stopped, though, now that Maka is in the room. Crona isn't embarrassed one bit about being stark naked, either. Maka distinctly remembers a panicked modesty being one of Crona's defining characteristics when they were young. This seems to have fled in adulthood. Maka wants to ask if she's alright, but the answer's implied. Instead, wordlessly, Maka boldly takes a step that something in her Grigori soul is telling her is necessary: gets into the tub, with all of her clothes on, and sits behind Crona, holding her from behind. 

 

Crona's tension relaxes immediately. She lazes, sinks back against Maka. Her cold head rests against Maka's shoulder, the wetness of her hair seeping into Maka's shirt. There isn't a word in any book that Maka can think to say; her heartbeat is  _flying_ fluttering, her energy wired, one last wave despite the whole of her exhaustion. She starts stringing her fingers through Crona's lavender hair, gently. Reaches over for the shampoo on one of the ledges, lathers her hands, and soaps the strands. Crona leans into her further, humming. "That feels nice," she whispers.

 

Maka doesn't want this to end, but eventually, it does. After rinsing Crona's hair entirely, Maka's thighs start trembling, her knees cramping.  _Go the fuck to sleep bitch,_ they seem to be saying. Maka rises, soaked, and it's cold, now that she's back out in the air. Crona follows suit, also standing, and Maka blushes probably burning red instantly. The intimacy of what they were doing makes her both want to run in sudden shame and hold Crona's body close to her, never let go. Crona possibly senses this, somehow, turns over her shoulder to glance at Maka. Beadlets of water flicker from her lashes. Maka doesn't want to push this any farther than it's already hypothetically gone and goes to get the two of them body towels from the bathroom cabinet. Crona dries herself on one side of the room, her back to Maka, and wraps the towel around her body neatly when she's done - she really is starting to remember what her life was like before, isn't she? Rings her hair out with her hands as Maka does away with her wet clothes - Crona doesn't watch her do it at all, which just makes Maka feel more protected and safe than she even knows what to do with - and wraps her towel around herself in similar fashion.

 

Crona wanted to kiss Maka in the bathtub, once the panic subsided. That’s what those feelings had been about, when Maka started soaping through her hair and Crona remembered that human skin on someone else is really nice, actually. Doesn't remember where she saw a kiss occurring, if she'd ever done it before herself, but it was something that two people who remember each other and care for each other do. She suddenly remembered having this feeling before a lot, when she was a student at the DWMA. The picture is coming back together now, unblurring itself.

 

Maka gives her an old white nightgown of hers to wear, and they lie on the bed across from each other, noses close to touching. The bright light of the moon shines in the window, illuminating them. Their wet hair is tangled together across the pillows.

 

“Maka?”

 

“Hm?”

 

“You look sad, or something else. Please don’t keep yourself awake for my sake.”

 

“Honestly, Crona, I’m afraid that this very long day really was a dream. That when I close my eyes...”

 

Crona slowly reaches for Maka’s hands, curling them in her own pruny ones, and whispers,

 

“I am real.”

 

That voice echoes in her head:  _You’re a farce. You’re her worst nightmare._

 

“I just don’t want it to end,” Maka says, her voice trembling. “I don’t know what I’ll do if they take you away.”

 

 _You’re sick,_ the voice rattles, _making her think you’re going to stay alive much longer. I’ve told you, my dear, I’m going to end you. I’m going to tear up all your skin, grind your bones to dust, and chew up your heart ‘til its a bloody pulp. I’ll be free, and she’ll wake up to your guts all over her sheets._

 

“Please, stop,” Crona mutters.

 

“Huh?”

 

“Not you, I - I’m sorry.”

 

Maka frowns, her hands framing Crona’s face.

 

“You’re hearing voices, aren’t you?”

 

Perhaps from embarrassment, two tiny wounds slice themselves open on Crona’s chest. Black blood trickles down her chest, but Maka brings her fingers to the incisions. They close up around her touch, and she wipes up the black blood with her fingertips. God, is Crona shivering at that touch - 

 

“It’s okay.” Maka must be so scared, isn’t she scared? But she looks calm on the outside, weathering the storm. “I can’t imagine what they must be saying. But I’m going to protect you, Crona. They’re just inside your head. They can’t hurt you.”

 

Crona braces herself for more taunts from the voice, but it's gone, at least for now.

 

“You are real,” Crona says to Maka.

 

“I am real.”

 

“This is real.”

 

Maka will not remember whether it was she or Crona who leaned in first, thinking back on this moment. It will not stay ingrained, how many minutes passed, how many times Maka pressed to her lips to Crona's, sweet and chaste, over and over. What will remain is how very real it was - their souls resonating as much as they still could, given the torment Crona's was toxified with, given the total purity of Maka's. 

 

Crona’s memories of her time with Maka years before start coming back in waves, full and in color. She sees light, happiness and hope. No Medusa, no murder, and no fear - just gleaming golden hallways and Maka and all of Maka's friends, clear and in focus, supporting her like she was always one of them.

 


End file.
